
Class 
Book. 



i 



MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 



[Authors Edition] 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 



AN INLAND VOYAGE. 

EDINBURGH. 

TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY. 

VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE. 

FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS. 

NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS. 

TREASURE ISLAND. 

THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS. 

A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES. 

PRINCE OTTO. 

STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE. 

KIDNAPPED. 

THE MERRY MEN AND OTHER TALES AND FABLES. 

UNDERWOODS. 

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS. 

MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN. 

{WITH MRS. STEVENSON.) 
MORE NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS : The Dynamiter. 



MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



ifl 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1887 

[All rights reserved'] 



Y^6 



'V 



<5^ 



^^^A 






TO 
MY MOTHER 

IN THE 
NAME OF PAST JOY AND PRESENT SORROW 

3£ 'Dztiicatt 

THESE MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 



S.S. ' Ludgate Hiir 

withi?i sight of Cape Race 



NOTE 

This volume of papers, unconnected as they 
are, it will be better to read through from 
the beginning, rather than dip into at 
random. A certain thread of meaning 
binds them. Memories of childhood and 
youth, portraits of those who have gone 
before us in the battle, — taken together, 
they build up a face that " I have loved 
long since and lost awhile," the face of what 
was once myself This has come by acci- 
dent ; I had no design at first to be 
autobiographical ; I was but led away by 
the charm of beloved memories and by 
regret for the irrevocable dead ; and when 
my own young face (which is a face of the 
dead also) began to appear in the well as 
by a kind of magic, I was the first to be 
surprised at the occurrence. 



viii Note 

My grandfather the pious child, my father 
the idle eager sentimental youth, I have 
thus unconsciously exposed. Of their de- 
scendant, the person of to-day, I wish to 
keep the secret : not because I love him 
better, but because, with him, I am still in 
a business partnership, and cannot divide 
interests. 

Of the papers which make up the volume, 
some have appeared already in TJu Cornhilly 
Longfnari!sy Scribner, The English Illustrated^ 
The Magasme of Art, The Contemporary 
Review ; three are here in print for the 
first time ; and two others have enjoyed only 
what may be regarded as a private circula- 
tion. 

R. L. S. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. The Foreigner at Hoivie . . i 

II. Some College Memories . . 24 

III. Old Mortality .... 38 

IV. A College Magazine . . -57 
V. An Old Scotch Gardener . . 77 

VI. Pastoral ..... 90 

VII. The Manse 106 

VIII. Memoirs of an Islet . . .120 

IX. Thomas Stevenson . . .132 

X. Talk and Talkers: First Paper 144 

XI. Talk AND Talkers : Second Paper 169 

XII. The Character of Dogs . . 191 



X Contents 

PAGE 

XIII. " A Penny Plain and Twopence 

Coloured" . . . .213 

XIV. A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas's 228 

XV. A Gossip on Romance . . 247 

XVI. A Humble Remonstrance . . 275 



THE FOREIGNER AT HOME 

** This is no my ain house ; 

I ken by the biggin' o't.'* 

npWO recent books/ one by Mr. Grant 
White on England, one on France by 
the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may 
well have set people thinking on the divi- 
sions of races and nations. Such thoughts 
should arise with particular congruity and 
force to inhabitants of that United King- 
dom, peopled from so many different stocks, 
babbling so many different dialects, and 
offering in its extent such singular contrasts, 
from the busiest over-population to the un- 
kindliest desert, from the Black Country to 

1 i88r. 
B 



2 Memories and Portraits 

the Moor of Rannoch. It is not only when 
we cross the seas that we go abroad ; there 
are foreign parts of England ; and the race 
that has conquered so wide an empire has 
not yet managed to assimilate the islands 
whence she sprang. Ireland, Wales, and the 
Scottish mountains still cling, in part, to 
their old Gaelic speech. It was but the 
other day that English triumphed in Corn- 
wall, and they still show in Mousehole, on 
St. Michael's Bay, the house of the last 
Cornish -speaking woman. English itself, 
which will now frank the traveller through 
the most of North America, through the 
greater South Sea Islands, in India, along 
much of the coast of Africa, and in the 
ports of China and Japan, is still to be 
heard, in its home country, in half a hun- 
dred varying stages of transition. You may 
go all over the States, and — setting aside the 
actual intrusion and influence of foreigners, 
negro, French, or Chinese — you shall scarce 
meet with so marked a difference of accent 
as in the forty miles between Edinburgh and 



The Foreigner at Home 3 

Glasgow, or of dialect as in the hundred 
miles between Edinburgh and Aberdeen. 
Book English has gone round the world, 
but at home we still preserve the racy 
idioms of our fathers, and every county, in 
some parts every dale, has its own quality 
of speech, vocal or verbal. In like manner, 
local custom and prejudice, even local re- 
ligion and local law, linger on into the latter 
end of the nineteenth century — imperia in 
imperio, foreign things at home. 

In spite of these promptings to reflection, 
ignorance of his neighbours is the character 
of the typical John Bull. His is a domi- 
neering nature, steady in fight, imperious to 
command, but neither curious nor quick 
about the life of others. In French colonies, 
and still more in the Dutch, I have read that 
there is an immediate and lively contact 
between the dominant and the dominated 
race, that a certain sympathy is begotten, or 
at the least a transfusion of prejudices, 
making life easier for both. But the Eng- 
lishman sits apart, bursting with pride and 



4 Memories and Portraits 

ignorance. He figures among his vassals 
in the hour of peace with the same disdain- 
ful air that led him on to victory. A 
passing enthusiasm for some foreign art or 
fashion may deceive the world, it cannot 
impose upon his intimates. He may be 
amused by a foreigner as by a monkey, but 
he will never condescend to study him with 
any patience. Miss Bird, an authoress with 
whom I profess myself in love, declares all 
the viands of Japan to be uneatable — a 
staggering pretension. So, when the Prince 
of Wales's marriage was celebrated at 
Mentone by a dinner to the Mentonese, it 
was proposed to give them solid English 
fare — roast beef and plum pudding, and no 
tomfoolery. Here we have either pole of 
the Britannic folly. We will not eat the 
food of any foreigner ; nor, when we have 
the chance, will we suffer him to eat of it 
himself. The same spirit inspired Miss 
Bird's American missionaries, who had come 
thousands of miles to change the faith of 
Japan, and openly professed their ignorance 



The Foreigner at Home 5 

of the religions they were trying to sup- 
plant. 

I quote an American in this connection 
without scruple. Uncle Sam is better than 
John Bull, but he is tarred with the English 
stick. For Mr. Grant White the States are 
the New England States and nothing more. 
He wonders at the amount of drinking in 
London ; let him try San Francisco. He 
wittily reproves English ignorance as to the 
status of women in America ; but has he 
not himself forgotten Wyoming ? The 
name Yankee, of which he is so tenacious, is 
used over the most of the great Union as a 
term of reproach. The Yankee States, of 
which he is so staunch a subject, are but a 
drop in the bucket. And we find in his 
book a vast virgin ignorance of the life and 
prospects of America ; every view partial, 
parochial, not raised to the horizon ; the 
moral feeling proper, at the largest, to 
a clique of States ; and the whole scope 
and atmosphere not American, but merely 
Yankee. I will go far beyond him in re- 



6 Memories and Portraits 

probating the assumption and the incivihty 
of my countryfolk to their cousins from 
beyond the sea ; I grill in my blood over 
the silly rudeness of our newspaper articles ; 
and I do not know where to look when I 
find myself in company with an American 
and see my countrymen unbending to him 
as to a performing dog. But in the case of 
Mr. Grant White example were better than 
precept. Wyoming is, after all, more readily 
accessible to Mr. White than Boston to the 
English, and the New England self-suffici- 
ency no better justified than the Britannic, 

It is so, perhaps, in all countries ; perhaps 
in all, men are most ignorant of the foreigners 
at home. John Bull is ignorant of the 
States ; he is probably ignorant of India ; 
but considering his opportunities, he is far 
more ignorant of countries nearer his own 
door. There is one country, for instance — • 
its frontier not so far from London, its 
people closely akin, its language the same 
in all essentials with the English — of which 
I will go bail he knows nothing. His 



The Foreigner at Home 7 

ignorance of the sister kingdom cannot be 

described ; it can only be illustrated by 

anecdote. I once travelled with a man of 

plausible manners and good intelligence, — a 

University man, as the phrase goes, — a man, 

besides, who had taken his degree in life and 

knew a thing or two about the age we live 

in. We were deep in talk, whirling between 

Peterborough and London ; among other 

things, he began to describe some piece of 

legal injustice he had recently encountered, 

• 
and I observed in my innocence that things 

were not so in Scotland. " I beg your 

pardon," said he, " this is a matter of law." 

He had never heard of the Scots law ; nor 

did he choose to be informed. The law 

was the same for the whole country, he 

told me roundly ; every child knew that. 

At last, to settle matters, I explained to 

him that I was a member of a Scottish 

legal body, and had stood the brunt of an 

examination in the very law in question. 

Thereupon he looked me for a moment full in 

the face and dropped the conversation. This 



8 Memories and Portraits 

is a monstrous instance, if you like, but it 
does not stand alone in the experienceof Scots. 
England and Scotland differ, indeed, in 
law, in history, in religion, in education, 
and in the very look of nature and men's 
faces, not always widely, but always trench- 
antly. Many particulars that struck Mr. 
Grant White, a Yankee, struck me, a Scot, 
no less forcibly ; he and I felt ourselves 
foreigners on many common provocations. 
A Scotchman may tramp the better part of 
Europe and the United States, and never 
again receive so vivid an impression of 
foreign travel and strange lands and man- 
ners as on his first excursion into England. 
The change from a hilly to a level country 
strikes him with delighted wonder. Along 
the flat horizon there arise the frequent 
venerable towers of churches. He sees at 
the end of airy vistas the revolution of the 
windmill sails. He may go where he 
pleases in the future ; he may see Alps, and 
Pyramids, and lions ; but it will be hard to 
beat the pleasure of that moment. There 



The Foreigner at Home g 

are, indeed, few merrier spectacles than that 
of many windmills bickering together in a 
fresh breeze over a woody country ; their 
halting alacrity of movement, their pleasant 
business, making bread all day with uncouth 
gesticulations, their air, gigantically human, 
as of a creature half alive, put a spirit ot 
romance into the tamest landscape. When the 
Scotch child sees them first he falls immedi- 
ately in love ; and from that time forward 
windmills keep turning in his dreams. And 
so, in their degree, with every feature of the 
life and landscape. The warm, habitable 
age of towns and hamlets, the green, settled, 
ancient look of the country; the lush hedge- 
rows, stiles, and privy pathways in the fields ; 
the sluggish, brimming rivers ; chalk and 
smock-frocks ; chimes of bells and the rapid, 
pertly -sounding English speech — they are 
all new to the curiosity ; they are all set 
to English airs in the child's story that 
he tells himself at night. The sharp 
edge of novelty wears off; the feeling is 
scotched, but I doubt whether it is ever 



I o Memories and Portraits 

killed. Rather it keeps returning, ever the 
more rarely and strangely, and even in 
scenes to which you have been long accus- 
tomed suddenly awakes and gives a relish to 
enjoyment or heightens the sense of isolation. 
One thing especially continues unfamiliar 
to the Scotchman's eye — the domestic archi- 
tecture, the look of streets and buildings ; 
the quaint, venerable age of many, and the 
thin walls and warm colouring of all. We 
have, in Scotland, far fewer ancient buildings, 
above all in country places ; and those that 
we have are all of hewn or harled masonry. 
Wood has been sparingly used in their con- 
struction ; the window-frames are sunken in 
the wall, not flat to the front, as in England ; 
the roofs are steeper- pitched ; even a hill 
farm will have a massy, square, cold and 
permanent appearance. English houses, in 
comparison, have the look of cardboard toys, 
such as a puff might shatter. And to this 
the Scotchman never becomes used. His 
eye can never rest consciously on one of 
these brick houses — rickles of brick, as he 



The Foreigner at Home 1 1 

might call them — or on one of these flat- 
chested streets, but he is instantly reminded 
where he is, and instantly travels back in 
fancy to his home. " This is no my ain 
house ; I ken by the biggin' o't." And yet 
perhaps it is his own, bought with his own 
money, the key of it long polished in his 
pocket ; but it has not yet, and never will 
be, thoroughly adopted by his imagination ; 
nor does he cease to remember that, in the 
whole length and breadth of his native 
country, there was no building even distantly 
resembling it. 

But it is not alone in scenery and archi- 
tecture that we count England foreign. The 
constitution of society, the very pillars of the 
empire, surprise and even pain us. The dull, 
neglected peasant, sunk in matter, insolent, 
gross and servile, makes a startling contrast 
with our own long - legged, lor\g - headed, 
thoughtful, Bible - quoting ploughman. A 
week or two in such a place as Suffolk 
leaves the Scotchman gasping. It seems 
incredible that within the boundaries of his 






1 2 Memories and Portraits 

own island a class should have been thus 
forgotten. Even the educated and intelli- 
gent, who hold our own opinions and speak 
in our own words, yet seem to hold them 
with a difference or from another reason, and 
to speak on all things with less interest and 
conviction. The first shock of English 
society is like a cold plunge. It is possible 
that the Scot comes looking for too much, 
and to be sure his first experiment will 
be in the wrong direction. Yet surely his 
complaint is grounded ; surely the speech of 
Englishmen is too often lacking in generous 
ardour, the better part of the man too often 
withheld from the social commerce, and the 
contact of mind with mind evaded as with 
terror. A Scotch peasant will talk more 
liberally out of his own experience. He 
will not put you by with conversational 
counters and small jests ; he will give you 
the best of himself, like one interested in 
life and man's chief end. A Scotchman 
is vain, interested in himself and others, 
eager for sympathy, setting forth his thoughts 



The Foreigner at Hoyne 1 3 

and experience in the best light The ego- 
ism of the Englishman is self - contained. 
He does not seek to proselytise. He takes 
no interest in Scotland or the Scotch, and, 
what is the unkindest cut of all, he does not 
care to justify his indifference. Give him 
the wages of going on and being an English- 
man, that is all he asks ; and in the mean- 
time, while you continue to associate, he 
would rather not be reminded of your baser 
origin. Compared with the grand, tree-like 
self-sufficiency of his demeanour, the vanity 
and curiosity of the Scot seem uneasy, 
vulgar and immodest. That you should 
continually try to establish human and 
serious relations, that you should actually 
feel an interest in John Bull, and desire 
and invite a return of interest from him, 
may argue something more awake and lively 
in your mind, but it still puts you in the 
attitude of a suitor and a poor relation. 
Thus even the lowest class of the educated 
English towers over a Scotchman by the 
head and shoulders. 



1 4 Memories and Porh^aits 

Different indeed is the atmosphere in 
which Scotch and English youth begin to 
look about them, come to themselves in life, 
and gather up those first apprehensions 
which are the material of future thought 
and, to a great extent, the rule of future 
conduct. I have been to school in both 
countries, and I found, in the boys of the 
North, something at once rougher and more 
tender, at once more reserve and more ex- 
pansion, a greater habitual distance chequered 
by glimpses of a nearer intimacy, and on 
the whole wider extremes of temperament 
and sensibility. The boy of the South 
seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful ; 
he gives himself to games as to a business, 
striving to excel, but is not readily transported 
by imagination ; the type remains with me 
as cleaner in mind and body, more active, 
fonder of eating, endowed with a lesser and 
a less romantic sense of life and of the future, 
and more immersed in present circumstances. 
And certainly, for one thing, English boys 
are younger for their age. Sabbath observ- 



The Foreigner at Ho7ne 1 5 

ance makes a series of grim, and perhaps 
serviceable, pauses in the tenor of Scotch 
boyhood — days of great stillness and solitude 
for the rebellious mind, when in the dearth 
of books and play, and in the intervals of 
studying the Shorter Catechism, the intellect 
and senses prey upon and test each other. 
The typical English Sunday, with the huge 
midday dinner and the plethoric afternoon, 
leads perhaps to different results. About 
the very cradle of the Scot there goes a hum 
of metaphysical divinity ; and the whole of 
two divergent systems is summed up, not 
merely speciously, in the two first questions 
of the rival catechisms, the English tritely 
inquiring, "What is your name?" the Scot- 
tish striking at the very roots of life with, 
" What is the chief end of man ? " and 
answering nobly, if obscurely, " To glorify 
God and to enjoy Him for ever." I do not 
wish to make an idol of the Shorter Cate- 
chism ; but the fact of such a question being 
asked opens to us Scotch a great field of 
speculation ; and the fact that it is asked 



1 6 Memories and Portraits 

of all of us, from the peer to the plough- 
boy, binds us more nearly together. No 
Englishman of Byron's age, character and 
history, would have had patience for long 
theological discussions on the way to fight 
for Greece ; but the daft Gordon blood 
and the Aberdonian schooldays kept their 
influence to the end. We have spoken of 
the material conditions ; nor need much 
more be said of these : of the land lying 
everywhere more exposed, of the wind always 
louder and bleaker, of the black, roaring 
winters, of the gloom of high-lying, old stone 
cities, imminent on the windy seaboard ; com- 
pared with the level streets, the warm colour- 
ing of the brick, the domestic quaintness 
of the architecture, among which English 
children begin to grow up and come to 
themselves in life. As the stage of the Uni- 
versity approaches, the contrast becomes more 
express. The English lad goes to Oxford 
or Cambridge ; there, in an ideal world of 
gardens, to lead a semi-scenic life, costumed, 
disciplined and drilled by proctors. Nor is 



The Foreigner at Home 1 7 

this to be regarded merely as a stage of 
education ; it is a piece of privilege besides, 
and a step that separates him further from 
the bulk of his compatriots. At an earlier 
age the Scottish lad begins his greatly dif- 
ferent experience of crowded class-rooms, of 
a gaunt quadrangle, of a bell hourly booming 
over the traffic of the city to recall him from 
the public-house where he has been lunching, 
or the streets where he has been wandering 
fancy-free. His college life has little of re- 
straint, and nothing of necessary gentility. 
He will find no quiet clique of the exclusive, 
studious and cultured ; no rotten borough of 
the arts. All classes rub shoulders on the 
greasy benches. The raffish young gentle- 
man in gloves must measure his scholarship 
with the plain, clownish laddie from the 
parish school. They separate, at the session's 
end, one to smoke cigars about a watering- 
place, the other to resume the labours of the 
field beside his peasant family. The first 
muster of a college class in Scotland is a 

scene of curious and painful interest ; so 
C 



A 



1 8 Memories and Portraits 

many lads, fresh from the heather, hang round 
the stove in cloddish embarrassment, ruffled 
by the presence of their smarter comrades, 
and afraid of the sound of their own rustic 
voices. It was in these early days, I think, 
that Professor Blackie won the affection of 
his pupils, putting these uncouth, umbrage- 
ous students at their ease with ready human 
geniality. Thus, at least, we have a healthy 
democratic atmosphere to breathe in while at 
work ; even when there is no cordiality there 
is always a juxtaposition of the different 
classes, and in the competition of study the 
intellectual power of each is plainly demon- 
strated to the other. Our tasks ended, we of 
the North go forth as freemen into the hum- 
ming, lamplit city. At five o'clock you may 
see the last of us hiving from the college 
gates, in the glare of the shop windows, 
under the green glimmer of the winter 
sunset. The frost tingles in our blood; 
no proctor lies in wait to intercept us ; 
till the bell sounds again, we are the 
masters of the world; and some portion 



The Foreigner at Home 1 9 

of our lives is always Saturday, la treve 
de Dieu. 

Nor must we omit the sense of the nature 
of his country and his country's history 
gradually growing in the child's mind from 
story and from observation. A Scottish 
child hears much of shipwreck, outlying iron 
skerries, pitiless breakers, and great sea- 
lights ; much of heathery mountains, wild 
clans, and hunted Covenanters. Breaths 
come to him in song of the distant Cheviots 
and the ring of foraying hoofs. He glories 
in his hard-fisted forefathers, of the iron 
girdle and the handful of oatmeal, who rode 
so swiftly and lived so sparely on their raids. 
Poverty, ill-luck, enterprise, and constant 
resolution are the fibres of the legend of his 
country's history. The heroes and kings of 
Scotland have been tragically fated ; the most 
marking incidents in Scottish history — Flod- 
den, Darien, or the Forty-five — were still 
either failures or defeats ; and the fall of 
Wallace and the repeated reverses of the 
Bruce combine with the very smallness of the 



20 Memories and Portraits 

country to teach rather a moral than a 
material criterion for life. Britain is alto- 
gether small, the mere taproot of her extended 
empire ; Scotland, again, which alone the 
Scottish boy adopts in his imagination, is 
but a little part of that, and avowedly cold, 
sterile and unpopulous. It is not so for 
nothing. I once seemed to have perceived in 
an American boy a greater readiness of sym- 
pathy for lands that are great, and rich, and 
growing, like his own. It proved to be quite 
otherwise: a mere dumb piece of boyish 
romance, that I had lacked penetration to 
divine. But the error serves the purpose 
of my argument ; for I am sure, at least, 
that the heart of young Scotland will be 
always touched more nearly by paucity of 
number and Spartan poverty of life. 

So we may argue, and yet the difference 
is not explained. That Shorter Catechism 
which I took as being so typical of Scotland, 
was yet composed in the city of Westminster. 
The division of races is more sharply marked 
within the borders of Scotland itself than 



The Foreigner at Home 2 1 

between the countries. Galloway and Buchan, 
Lothian and Lochaber, are like foreign parts ; 
yet you may choose a man from any of 
them, and, ten to one, he shall prove to have 
the headmark of a Scot. A century and 
a half ago the Highlander wore a differ- 
ent costume, spoke a different language, wor- 
shipped in another church, held different 
morals, and obeyed a different social consti- 
tution from his fellow-countrymen either of 
the south or north. Even the English, it is 
recorded, did not loathe the Highlander and 
the Highland costume as they were loathed 
by the remainder of the Scotch. Yet the 
Highlander felt himself a Scot. He would 
willingly raid into the Scotch lowlands ; but 
his courage failed him at the border, and he 
regarded England as a perilous, unhomely 
land. When the Black Watch, after years of 
foreign service, returned to Scotland, veterans 
leaped out and kissed the earth at Port 
Patrick. They had been in Ireland, stationed 
among men of their own race and language, 
where they were well liked and treated with 



22 Memories and Portraits 

affection ; but it was the soil of Galloway 
that they kissed at the extreme end of the 
hostile lowlands, among a people who did 
not understand their speech, and who had 
hated, harried, and hanged them since the 
dawn of history. Last, and perhaps most 
curious, the sons of chieftains were often 
educated on the continent of Europe. They 
went abroad speaking Gaelic ; they returned 
speaking, not English, but the broad dialect 
of Scotland. Now, what idea had they in 
their minds when they thus, in thought, iden- 
tified themselves with their ancestral enemies ? 
What was. the sense in which they were 
Scotch and not English, or Scotch and not 
Irish ? Can a bare name be thus influential 
on the minds and affections of men, and a 
political aggregation blind them to the nature 
of facts ? The story of the Austrian Empire 
would seem to answer. No; the far more 
galling business of Ireland clenches the nega- 
tive from nearer home. Is it common edu- 
cation, common morals, a common language 
or a common faith, that join men into 



The Foreigner at Home 2 3 

nations ? There were practically none of 
these in the case we are considering. 

The fact remains : in spite of the difference 
of blood and language, the Lowlander feels 
himself the sentimental countryman of the 
Highlander. When they meet abroad, they 
fall upon each other's necks in spirit ; even 
at home there is a kind of clannish intimacy 
in their talk. But from his compatriot 
in the south the Lowlander stands con- 
sciously apart. He has had a different 
training ; he obeys different laws ; he makes 
his will in other terms, is otherwise divorced 
and married ; his eyes are not at home in 
an English landscape or with English houses; 
his ear continues to remark the English 
speech ; and even though his tongue acquire 
the Southern knack, he will still have a strong 
Scotch accent of the mind. 



II 

SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES^ 

T AM asked to write something (it is not 
specifically stated what) to the profit 
and glory of my Alma Mater; and the fact 
is I seem to be in very nearly the same case 
with those who addressed me, for while I am 
willing enough to write something, I know 
not what to write. Only one point I see, 
that if I am to write at all, it should be of 
the University itself and my own days under 
its shadow ; of the things that are still the 
same and of those that are already changed : 
such talk, in short, as would pass naturally 
between a student of to-day and one of yes- 

1 Written for the "Book" of the Edmburgh University 
Union Fancy Fair. 



Some College Memories 25 

terday, supposing them to meet and grow 
confidential. 

The generations pass away swiftly enough 
on the high seas of life ; more swiftly still in 
the little bubbling backwater of the quad- 
rangle ; so that we see there, on a scale 
startlingly diminished, the flight of time and 
the succession of men, I looked for my 
name the other day in last year's case book 
of the Speculative. Naturally enough I 
looked for it near the end ; it was not there, 
nor yet in the next column, so that I began 
to think it had been dropped at press ; and 
when at last I found it, mounted on the 
shoulders of so many successors, and looking 
in that posture like the name of a man of 
ninety, I was conscious of some of the dig- 
nity of years. This kind of dignity of tem- 
poral precession is likely, with prolonged life, to 
become more familiar, possibly less welcome ; 
but I felt it strongly then, it is strongly 
on me now, and I am the more embold- 
ened to speak with my successors in the 
tone of a parent and a praiser of things past 



26 Me^nories and Portraits 

For, indeed, that which they attend is 
but a fallen University ; it has doubtless 
some remains of good, for human institutions 
decline by gradual stages ; but decline, in 
spite of all seeming embellishments, it does ; 
and what is perhaps more singular, began to 
do so when I ceased to be a student. Thus, 
by an odd chance, I had the very last of the 
very best of Alma Mater ; the same thing, 
I hear (which makes it the more strange), had 
previously happened to my father ; and if 
they are good and do not die, something not 
at all unsimilar will be found in time to 
have befallen my successors of to-day. Of 
the specific points of change, of advantage in 
the past, of shortcoming in the present, I must 
own that, on a near examination, they look 
wondrous cloudy. The chief and far the most 
lamentable change is the absence of a cer- 
tain lean, ugly, idle, unpopular student, whose 
presence was for me the gist and heart of the 
whole matter ; whose changing humours, fine 
occasional purposes of good, flinching accept- 
ance of evil, shiverings on wet, east-windy, 



Some College Memories 27 

morning journeys up to class, infinite yawn- 
ings during lecture and unquenchable gusto 
in the delights of truantry, made up the sun- 
shine and shadow of my college life. You 
cannot fancy what you missed in missing 
him ; his virtues, I make sure, are inconceiv- 
able to his successors, just as they were 
apparently concealed from his contemporaries, 
for I was practically alone in the pleasure I 
had in his society. Poor soul, I remember 
how much he was cast down at times, and 
how life (which had not yet begun) seemed 
to be already at an end, and hope quite dead, 
and misfortune and dishonour, like physical 
presences, dogging him as he went. And it 
may be worth while to add that these clouds 
rolled away in their season, and that all 
clouds roll away at last, and the troubles of 
youth in particular are things but of a 
moment. So this student, whom I have in 
my eye, took his full share of these concerns, 
and that very largely by his own fault ; but 
he still clung to his fortune, and in the midst 
of much misconduct, kept on in his own way 



2 8 Memories and Portraits 

learning how to work ; and at last, to his 
wonder, escaped out of the stage of student- 
ship not openly shamed ; leaving behind him 
the University of Edinburgh shorn of a good 
deal of its interest for myself 

But while he is (in more senses than one) 
the first person, he is by no means the only 
one whom I regret, or whom the students of 
to-day, if they knew what they had lost, 
would regret also. They have still Tait, to 
be sure — long may they have him ! — and 
they have still Tait's class-room, cupola and 
all ; but think of what a different place it 
was when this youth of mine (at least on roll 
days) would be present on the benches, and, 
at the near end of the platform, Lindsay 
senior-^ was airing his robust old age. It is 
possible my successors may have never even 
heard of Old Lindsay; but when he went, a 
link snapped with the last century. He had 
something of a rustic air, sturdy and fresh 
and plain; he spoke with a ripe east-country 
accent, which I used to admire ; his reminis- 

^ Professor Tait's laboratory assistant. 



Some College Memories 29 

cences were all of journeys on foot or high- 
ways busy with post-chaises — a Scotland 
before steam ; he had seen the coal fire on 
the Isle of May, and he regaled me with 
tales of my own grandfather. Thus he was 
for me a mirror of things perished ; it was 
only in his memory that I could see the huge 
shock of flames of the May beacon stream to 
leeward, and the watchers, as they fed the 
fire, lay hold unscorched of the windward 
bars of the furnace ; it was only thus that 
I could see my grandfather driving swiftly in 
a gig along the seaboard road from Pitten- 
weem to Crail, and for all his business hurry, 
drawing up to speak good-humouredly with 
those he met. And now, in his turn, Lind- 
say is gone also ; inhabits only the memories 
of other men, till these shall follow him ; and 
figures in my reminiscences as my grandfather 
figured in his. 

To - day, again, they have Professor 
Butcher, and I hear he has a prodigious deal 
of Greek ; and they have Professor Chrystal, 
who is a man filled with the mathematics. 



30 Memories and Portraits 

And doubtless these are set-offs. But they 
cannot change the fact that Professor Blackie - 
has retired, and that Professor Kelland is 
dead. No man's education is complete or 
truly liberal who knew not Kelland. There 
were unutterable lessons in the mere sight of 
that frail old clerical gentleman, lively as a 
boy, kind like a fairy godfather, and keeping 
perfect order in his class by the spell of that 
very kindness. I have heard him drift into 
reminiscences in class time, though not for 
long, and give us glimpses of old-world life 
in out-of-the-way English parishes when he 
was young ; thus playing the same part as 
Lindsay — the part of the surviving memory, 
signalling out of the dark backward and 
abysm of time the images of perished things. 
But it was a part that scarce became him ; 
he somehow lacked the means : for all his 
silver hair and worn face, he was not truly 
old ; and he had too much of the unrest and 
petulant fire of youth, and too much invin- 
cible innocence of mind, to play the veteran 
well. The time to measure him best, to 



Some College Memories 3 1 

taste (in the old phrase) his gracious nature, 
was when he received his class at home. 
What a pretty simplicity would he then 
show, trying to amuse us like children with 
toys ; and what an engaging nervousness of 
manner, as fearing that his efforts might not 
succeed ! Truly he made us all feel like 
children, and like children embarrassed, but 
at the same time filled with sympathy for the 
conscientious, troubled elder-boy who was 
working so hard to entertain us. A theorist 
has held the view that there is no feature in 
man so tell-tale as his spectacles ; that the 
mouth may be compressed and the brow 
smoothed artificially, but the sheen of the 
barnacles is diagnostic. And truly it must 
have been thus with Kelland ; for as I still 
fancy I behold him frisking actively about 
the platform, pointer in hand, that which I 
seem to see most clearly is the way his 
glasses glittered with affection. I never 
knew but one other man who had (if you 
will permit the phrase) so kind a spectacle; 
and that was Dr. Appleton. But the 



3 2 Memories and Portraits 

light in his case was tempered and passive ; 
in Kelland's it danced, and changed, and 
flashed vivaciously among the students, Hke 
a perpetual challenge to goodwill. 

I cannot say so much about Professor 
Blackie, for a good reason. Kelland's class 
I attended, once even gained there a certifi- 
cate of merit, the only distinction of my 
University career. But although I am the 
holder of a certificate of attendance in the 
professor's own hand, I cannot remember to 
hcive been present in the Greek class above 
a dozen times. Professor Blackie was even 
kind enough to remark (more than once) 
while in the very act of writing the docu- 
ment above referred to, that he did not know 
my face. Indeed, I denied myself many 
opportunities ; acting upon an extensive and 
highly rational system of truantry, which cost 
me a great deal of trouble to put in exercise 
— perhaps as much as would have taught 
me Greek — and sent me forth into the world 
and the profession of letters with the merest 
shadow of an education. But they say it is 



Some College Memories 33 

always a good thing to have taken pains, 
and that success is its own reward, whatever 
be its nature ; so that, perhaps, even upon 
this I should plume myself, that no one ever 
played the truant with more deliberate care, 
and none ever had more certificates for less 
education. One consequence, however, of 
my system is that I have much less to say 
of Professor Blackie than I had of Professor 
Kelland ; and as he is still alive, and will 
long, I hope, continue to be so, it will not 
surprise you very much that I have no in- 
tention of saying it. 

Meanwhile, how many others have gone — 
Jenkin, Hodgson, and I know not who 
besides ; and of that tide of students that 
used to throng the arch and blacken the 
quadrangle, how many are scattered into the 
remotest parts of the earth, and how many 
more have lain down beside their fathers in 
their " resting -graves "! And again, how 
many of these last have not found their way 
there, all too early, through the stress of 
education ! That was one thing, at least, 



34 Memories and Portraits 

from which my truantry protected me. I 
am sorry indeed that I have no Greek, but I 
should be sorrier still if I were dead ; nor do 
I know the name of that branch of know- 
ledge which is worth acquiring at the price 
of a brain fever. There are many sordid 
tragedies in the life of the student, above all 
if he be poor, or drunken, or both ; but 
nothing more moves a wise man's pity than 
the case of the lad who is in too much hurry 
to be learned. And so, for the sake of a 
moral at the end, I will call up one more 
figure, and have done. A student, ambitious 
of success by that hot, intemperate manner 
of study that now grows so common, read 
night and day for an examination. As he 
went on, the task became more easy to him, 
sleep was more easily banished, his brain 
grew hot and clear and more capacious, the 
necessary knowledge daily fuller and more 
orderly. It came to the eve of the trial and 
he watched all night in his high chamber, 
reviewing what he knew, and already secure 
of success. His window looked eastward, 



Some College Memories 35 

and being (as I said) high up, and the house 
itself standing on a hill, commanded a view 
over dwindling suburbs to a country horizon. 
At last my student drew up his blind, and 
still in quite a jocund humour, looked abroad. 
Day was breaking, the east was tinging with 
strange fires, the clouds breaking up for the 
coming of the sun ; and at the sight, name- 
less terror seized upon his mind. He was. 
sane, his senses were undisturbed ; he saw 
clearly, and knew what he was seeing, and 
knew that it was normal ; but he could 
neither bear to see it nor find the strength 
to look away, and fled in panic from his 
chamber into the enclosure of the street. 
In the cool air and silence, and among the 
sleeping houses, his strength was renewed. 
Nothing troubled him but the memory of 
what had passed, and an abject fear of its 
return. 

*• Gallo canente, spes redit, 
Aegris salus refunditur, 
Lapsis fides revertitur, " 

as they sang of old in Portugal in the 



36 Memories and Portraits 

Morning Office. But to him that good hour 
of cockcrow, and the changes of the dawn, 
had brought panic, and lasting doubt, and 
such terror as he still shook to think of. 
He dared not return to his lodging ; he 
could not eat ; he sat down, he rose up, 
he wandered ; the city woke about him with 
its cheerful bustle, the sun climbed overhead; 
and still he grew but the more absorbed in 
the distress of his recollection and the fear 
of his past fear. At the appointed hour, he 
came to the door of the place of examina- 
tion; but when he was asked, he had for- 
gotten his name. Seeing him so disordered, 
they had not the heart to send him away, 
but gave him a paper and admitted him, 
still nameless, to the Hall. Vain kindness, 
vain efforts. He could only sit in a still 
growing horror, writing nothing, ignorant of 
all, his mind filled with a single memory of 
the breaking day and his own intolerable 
fear. And that same night he was tossing 
in a brain fever. 

People are afraid of war and wounds and 



Some College Me^nories 37 

dentists, all with excellent reason ; but these 
are not to be compared with such chaotic 
terrors of the mind as fell on this young 
man, and made him cover his eyes from the 
innocent morning. We all have by our 
bedsides the box of the Merchant Abudah, 
thank God, securely enough shut ; but when 
a young man sacrifices sleep to labour, let 
him have a care, for he is playing with the 
lock. 



Ill 

OLD MORTALITY 

I 

HP HERE is a certain graveyard, looked 
upon on the one side by a prison, on 
the other by the windows of a quiet hotel ; 
below, under a steep cliff, it beholds the 
traffic of many lines of rail, and the scream 
of the engine and the shock of meeting 
buffers mount to it all day long. The aisles 
are lined with the inclosed sepulchres of 
families, door beyond door, like houses in a 
street ; and in the morning the shadow of the 
prison turrets, and of many tall memorials, 
fall upon the graves. There, in the hot fits 
of youth, I came to be unhappy. Pleasant 
incidents are woven with my memory of the 



Old Mortality 39 

place. I here made friends with a certain 
plain old gentleman, a visitor on sunny 
mornings, gravely cheerful, who, with one eye 
upon the place that awaited him, chirped 
about his youth like winter sparrows ; a 
beautiful housemaid of the hotel once, for 
some days together, dumbly flirted with me 
from a window and kept my wild heart 
flying ; and once — she possibly remembers 
— the wise Eugenia followed me to that 
austere inclosure. Her hair came down, and 
in the shelter of the tomb my trembling 
fingers helped her to repair the braid. But 
for the most part I went there solitary and, 
with irrevocable emotion, pored on the names 
'' of the forgotten. Name after name, and to 
each the conventional attributions and the 
idle dates : a regiment of the unknown that 
had been the joy of mothers, and had thrilled 
with the illusions of youth, and at last, in the 
dim sick-room, wrestled with the pangs of 
old mortality. In that whole crew of the 
silenced there was but one of whom my fancy 
had received a picture ; and he, with his 



40 Memories and Portraits 

comely, florid countenance, bewigged and 
habited in scarlet, and in his day combining 
fame and popularity, stood forth, like a taunt, 
among that company of phantom appellations. 
It was then possible to leave behind us 
something more explicit than these severe, 
monotonous and lying epitaphs ; and the 
thing left, the memory of a painted picture 
and what we call the immortality of a name, 
was hardly more desirable than mere oblivion. 
Even David Hume, as he lay composed be- 
neath that " circular idea," was fainter than a 
dream ; and when the housemaid, broom in 
hand, smiled and beckoned from the open 
window, the fame of that bewigged philoso- 
pher melted like a raindrop in the sea. 

And yet in soberness I cared as little for 
the housemaid as for David Hume. The 
interests of youth are rarely frank ; his 
passions, like Noah's dove, come home to 
roost. The fire, sensibility, and volume of 
his own nature, that is all that he has learned 
to recognise. The tumultuary and gray 
tide of life, the empire of routine, the unre- 



Old Mortality 41 

joicing faces of his elders, fill him with con- 
temptuous surprise ; there also he seems to 
walk among the tombs of spirits ; and it is 
only in the course of years, and after much 
rubbing with his fellow-men, that he begins 
by glimpses to see himself from without and 
his fellows from within : to know his own for 
one among the thousand undenoted coun- 
tenances of the city street, and to divine in 
others the throb of human agony and hope. 
In the meantime he will avoid the hospital 
doors, the pale faces, the cripple, the sweet 
whiff of chloroform — for there, on the most 
thoughtless, the pains of others are burned 
home ; but he will continue to walk, in a 
divine self-pity, the aisles of the forgotten 
graveyard. The length of man's life, which 
is endless to the brave and busy, is scorned 
by his ambitious thought. He cannot bear] 
to have come for so little, and to go again so 
wholly. He cannot bear, above all, in that 
brief scene, to be still idle, and by way of 
cure, neglects the little that he has to do. 
The parable of the talent is the brief epitome 



42 Memories and Portraits 

of youth. To believe in immortality is one 
thing-, but it is first needful to believe in life. 
Denunciatory preachers seem not to suspect 
that they may be taken gravely and in evil 
part ; that young men may come to think of 
time as of a moment, and with the pride of 
Satan wave back the inadequate gift. Yet 
here is a true peril ; this it is that sets them 
to pace the graveyard alleys and to read, 
with strange extremes of pity and derision, 
the memorials of the dead. 

Books were the proper remedy : books of 
vivid human import, forcing upon their minds 
the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance and 
immediacy of that life in which they stand ; 
books of smiling or heroic temper, to excite 
or to console ; books of a large design, 
shadowing the complexity of that game of 
consequences to which we all sit down, the 
hanger-back not least. But the average 
sermon flees the point, disporting itself in 
that eternity of which we know, and need to 
know, so little ; avoiding the bright, crowded, 
and momentous fields of life where destiny 



Old Mortality 43 

awaits us. Upon the average book a writer 
may be silent ; he may set it down to his ill- 
hap that when his own youth was in the 
acrid fermentation, he should have fallen and 
fed upon the cheerless fields of Obermann. 
Yet to Mr. Arnold, who led him to these 
pastures, he still bears a grudge. The day 
is perhaps not far off when people will begin 
to count Moll Flanders ^ ay, or The Country 
Wife, more wholesome and more pious diet 
than these guide-books to consistent egoism. 
But the most inhuman of boys soon 
wearies of the inhumanity of Obermann. And 
even while I still continued to be a haunter 
of the graveyard, I began insensibly to turn 
my attention to the grave-diggers, and was 
weaned out of myself to observe the conduct 
of visitors. This was dayspring, indeed, to 
a lad in such great darkness. Not that I 
began to see men, or to try to see them, 
from within, nor to learn charity and 
modesty and justice from the sight ; but still 
stared at them externally from the prison 
windows of my affectation. Once I remem- 



44 Memories and Portraits 

ber to have observed two working-women 
with a baby halting by a grave ; there was 
something monumental in the grouping, one 
upright carrying the child, the other with 
bowed face crouching by her side. A wreath 
of immortelles under a glass dome had thus 
attracted them ; and, drawing near, I over- 
heard their judgment on that wonder. " Eh ! 
what extravagance ! " To a youth afflicted 
with the callosity of sentiment, this quaint 
and pregnant saying appeared merely base. 

My acquaintance with grave-diggers, con- 
sidering its length, was unremarkable. One, 
indeed, whom I found plying his spade in the 
red evening, high above Allan Water and in 
the shadow of Dunblane Cathedral, told me of 
his acquaintance with the birds that still 
attended on his labours ; how some would 
even perch about him, waiting for their prey ; 
and in a true Sexton's Calendar, how the 
species varied with the season of the year. 
But this was the very poetry of the profes- 
sion. The others whom I knew were some- 
what dry. A faint flavour of the gardener 



Old Mortality 45 

hung about them, but sophisticated and 
disbloomed. They had engagements to 
keep, not alone with the deUberate series of 
the seasons, but with mankind's clocks and 
hour-long measurement of time. And thus 
there was no leisure for the relishing pinch, 
or the hour-long gossip, foot on spade. 
They were men wrapped up in their grim 
business ; they liked well to open long-closed 
family vaults, blowing in the key and throw- 
ing wide the grating ; and they carried in 
their minds a calendar of names and dates. 
It would be '*' in fifty-twa " that such a tomb 
was last opened for " Miss Jemimy." It was 
thus they spoke of their past patients — famili- 
arly but not without respect, like old family 
servants. Here is indeed a servant, whom we 
forget that we possess ; who does not wait at 
the bright table, or run at the bell's summons, 
but patiently smokes his pipe beside the 
mortuary fire, and in his faithful memory 
notches the burials of our race. To suspect 
Shakespeare in his maturity of a superficial 
touch savours of paradox ; yet he was surely 



46 Memories and Portraits 

in error when he attributed insensibility to 
the digger of the grave. But perhaps it is 
on Hamlet that the charge should lie ; or 
perhaps the English sexton differs from the 
Scotch. The "goodman delver,-' reckoning 
up his years of office, might have at least 
suggested other thoughts. It is a pride 
common among sextons. A cabinet-maker 
does not count his cabinets, nor even an 
author his volumes, save when they stare 
upon him from the shelves ;, but the grave- 
digger numbers his graves. He would in- 
deed be something different from human if 
his solitary open-air and tragic labours left 
not a broad mark upon his mind. There, 
in his tranquil aisle, apart from city clamour, 
among the cats and robins and the ancient 
effigies and legends of the tomb, he waits 
the continual passage of his contemporaries, 
falling like minute drops into eternity. 
As they fall, he counts them ; and this 
enumeration, which was at first perhaps 
appalling to his soul, in the process of years 
and by the kindly influence of habit grows 



Old Mortality 47 

to be his pride and pleasure. There are 
many common stories telling how he piques 
himself on crowded cemeteries. But I will 
rather tell of the old grave-digger of Monk- 
ton, to whose unsuffering bedside the minister 
was summoned. He dwelt in a cottage 
built into the wall of the churchyard ; and 
through a bull's-eye pane above his bed he 
could see, as he lay dying, the rank grasses 
and the upright and recumbent stones. Dr. 
Laurie was, I think, a Moderate : 'tis cer- 
tain, at least, that he took a veiy Roman 
view of deathbed dispositions ; for he told 
the old man that he had lived beyond man's 
natural years, that his life had been easy 
and reputable, that his family had all grown 
up and been a credit to his care, and that it 
now behoved him unregretfully to gird his 
loins and follow the majority. The grave- 
digger heard him out ; then he raised himself 
upon one elbow, and with the other hand 
pointed through the window to the scene of 
his life-long labours. " Doctor," he said, " I 
ha'e laid three hunner and fower-score in 



48 Memories and Portraits 

that kirkyaird ; an it had been His wull," 
indicating Heaven, " I would ha'e likit weel 
to ha'e made out the fower hunner." But it 
was not to be ; this tragedian of the fifth 
act had now another part to play ; and the 
time had come when others were to gird 
and carry him. 

II 

I would fain strike a note that should be 
more heroical ; but the ground of all youth's 
suffering, solitude, hysteria, and haunting of 
the grave, is nothing else than naked, igno- 
rant selfishness. It is himself that he sees 
dead ; those are his virtues that are for- 
gotten ; his is the vague epitaph. Pity him 
but the more, if pity be your cue ; for where 
a man is all pride, vanity, and personal aspir- 
ation, he goes through fire unshielded. In 
every part and corner of our life, to lose 
oneself is to be gainer ; to forget oneself is 
to be happy ; and this poor, laughable and 
tragic fool has not yet learned the rudi- 
ments ; himself, giant Prometheus, is still 



Old Mortality 49 

ironed on the peaks of Caucasus. But by 

and by his truant interests will leave that 

tortured body, slip abroad and gather flowers. 

Then shall death appear before him in an 

altered guise ; no longer as a doom peculiar 

to himself, whether fate's crowning injustice 

or his own last vengeance upon those who 

fail to value him ; but now as a power that 

wounds him far more tenderly, not without 

solemn compensations, taking and giving, 

bereaving and yet storing up. 

The first step for all is to learn to the 

dregs our own ignoble fallibility. When we 

have fallen through storey after storey of our 

vanity and aspiration, and sit rueful among 

the ruins, then it is that we begin to measure 

the stature of our friends : how they stand 

between us and our own contempt, believing 

in our best ; how, linking us with others, and 

still spreading wide the influential circle, 

they weave us in and in with the fabric of 

contemporary life ; and to what petty size 

they dwarf the virtues and the vices that 

appeared gigantic in our youth. So that at 
E 



so Memories and Portraits 

the last, when such a pin falls out — when 
there vanishes in the least breath of time one 
of those rich magazines of life on which we 
drew for our supply — when he who had first 
dawned upon us as a face among the faces of 
the city, and, still growing, came to bulk on 
our regard with those clear features of the 
loved and living man, falls in a breath to 
memory and shadow, there falls along with 
him a whole wing of the palace of our life. 

Ill 

One such face I now remember; one 
such blank some half a dozen of us labour 
to dissemble. In his youth he was most 
beautiful in person, most serene and genial 
by disposition ;. full of racy words and quaint 
thoughts. Laughter attended on his coming. 
He had the air of a great gentleman, jovial 
and royal with his equals, and to the poorest 
student gentle and attentive. Power seemed 
to reside in him exhaustless ; we saw him 
stoop to play with us, but held him marked 



Old Mortality 5 1 

for higher destinies ; we loved his notice ; 
and I have rarely had my pride more gratified 
than when he sat at my father's table, my 
acknowledged friend. So he walked among 
us, both hands full of gifts, carrying with non- 
chalance the seeds of a most influential life. 

The powers and the ground of friendship 
is a mystery ; but, looking back, I can dis- 
cern that, in part, we loved the thing he was, 
for some shadow of what he was to be. For 
with all his beauty, power, breeding, urbanity 
and mirth, there w^as in those days some- 
thing soulless in our friend. He would 
astonish us by sallies, witty, innocent and 
inhumane ; and by a misapplied Johnsonian 
pleasantry, demolish honest sentiment. I can 
still see and hear him, as he went his way 
along the lamplit streets, La ci darem la mano 
on his lips, a noble figure of a youth, but 
following vanity and incredulous of good ; 
and sure enough, somewhere on the high 
seas of life, with his health, his hopes, his 
patrimony and his self-respect, miserably 
went down. 



5 2 Memories and Portraits 

From this disaster, like a spent swimmer, 
he came desperately ashore, bankrupt of 
money and consideration ; creeping to the 
family he had deserted ; with broken wing, 
never more to rise. But in his face there 
was a light of knowledge that was new to it. 
Of the wounds of his body he was never 
healed ; died of them gradually, with clear- 
eyed resignation ; of his wounded pride, we 
knew only from his silence. He returned to 
that city where he had lorded it in his 
ambitious youth ; lived there alone, seeing 
few ; striving to retrieve the irretrievable ; at 
times still grappling with that mortal frailty 
that had brought him down ; still joying in 
his friend's successes ; his laugh still ready 
but with kindlier music ; and over all his 
thoughts the shadow of that unalterable law 
which he had disavowed and which had 
brought him low. Lastly, when his bodily 
evils had quite disabled him, he lay a great 
while dying, still without complaint, still 
finding interests ; to his last step gentle, 
urbane and with the will to smile. 



Old Mortality 53 

The tale of this great failure is, to those 
who remained true to him, the tale of a 
success. In his youth he took thought for 
no one but himself; when he came ashore 
again, his whole armada lost, he seemed to 
think of none but others. Such was his 
tenderness for others, such his instinct of fine 
courtesy and pride, that of that impure 
passion of remorse he never breathed a 
syllable ; even regret was rare with him, and 
pointed with a jest. You would not have 
dreamed, if you had known him then, that this 
was that great failure, that beacon to young 
men, over whose fall a whole society had 
hissed and pointed fingers. Often have we 
gone to him, red-hot with our own hopeful 
sorrows, railing on the rose-leaves in our 
princely bed of life, and he would patiently 
give ear and wisely counsel ; and it was only 
upon some return of our own thoughts that 
we were reminded what manner of man 
this was to whom we disembosomed: a man, 
by his own fault, ruined ; shut out of the 
garden of his gifts ; his whole city of hope 



5 4 Memories and Portraits 

both ploughed and salted ; silently awaiting 
the deliverer. Then something took us by 
the throat ; and to see him there, so gentle, 
patient, brave and pious, oppressed but not 
cast down, sorrow was so swallowed up in 
admiration that we could not dare to pity 
him. Even if the old fault flashed out again, 
it but awoke our wonder that, in that lost 
battle, he should have still the energy to 
fight. He had gone to ruin with a kind of 
kingly abandon, like one who condescended ; 
but once ruined, with the lights all out, he 
fought as for a kingdom. Most men, find- 
ing themselves the authors of their own 
disgrace, rail the louder against God or 
destiny. Most men, when they repent, oblige 
their friends to share the bitterness of that 
repentance. But he had held an inquest 
and passed sentence : me?ie, inene ; and con- 
demned himself to smiling silence. He had 
given trouble enough ; had earned misfortune 
amply, and foregone the right to murmur. 

Thus was our old comrade, like Samson, 
careless in his days of strength ; but on the 



Old Mortality 5 5 

coming of adversity, and when that strength 
was gone that had betrayed him — " for our 
strength is weakness " — he began to blossom 
and bring forth. Well, now, he is out of the 
fight : the burden that he bore thrown down 
before the great deliverer. We 

•* in the vast cathedral leave him ; 
God accept him, 
Christ receive himl" 



IV 



If we go now and look on these innumer- 
able epitaphs, the pathos and the irony are 
strangely fled. They do not stand merely 
to the dead; these foolish monuments ; they 
are pillars and legends set up to glorify the 
difficult but not desperate life of man. This 
ground is hallowed by the heroes of defeat. 

I see the indifferent pass before my friend's 
last resting-place ; pause, with a shrug of 
pity, marvelling that so rich an argosy had 
sunk. A pity, now that he is done with 
suffeiing, a pity most uncalled for, and an 



56 Memories and Portraits 

ignorant wonder. Before those who loved 
him, his memory shines like a reproach ; 
they honour him for silent lessons ; they 
cherish his example ; and in what remains 
before them of their toil, fear to be unworthy 
of the dead. For this proud man was one of 
those who prospered in the valley of humilia- 
tion ; — of whom Bunyan wrote that, " Though 
Christian had the hard hap to meet in the 
valley with Apollyon, yet I must tell you, 
that in former times men have met with 
angels here ; have found pearls here ; and 
have in this place found the words of life." 



J 



IV 

A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 



A LL through my boyhood and youth, I was 
known and pointed out for the pattern 
of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my 
own private end, which was to learn to write. 
I kept always two books in my pocket, one 
to read, one to write in. As I walked, my 
mind was busy fitting what I saw with ap- 
propriate words ; when I sat by the roadside, 
I would either read, or a pencil and a penny 
version-book would be in my hand, to note 
down the features of the scene or commemo- 
rate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived 
with words. And what I thus wrote was for 
no ulterior use, it was written consciously 



5 8 Memories and Portraits 

for practice. It was not so much that I 
wished to be an author (though I wished 
that too) as that I had vow^ed that I would 
learn to write. That was a proficiency that 
tempted me ; and I practised to acquire it, 
as men learn to whittle, in a wager with 
myself. Description was the principal field 
of my exercise ; for to any one with senses 
there is always something w^orth describing, 
and town and country are but one continu- 
ous subject. But I worked in other ways 
also; often accompanied my walks with dra- 
matic dialogues, in which I played many 
parts ; and often exercised myself in writing 
down conversations from memory. 

This was all excellent, no doubt ; so were 
the diaries I sometimes tried to keep, but 
always and very speedily discarded, finding 
them a school of posturing and melancholy 
self-deception. And yet this was not the 
most efficient part of my training. Good 
though it was, it only taught me (so far as I 
have learned them at all) the lower and less 
intellectual elements of the art, the choice of 



A College Magazine 59 

the essential note and the right word : things 
that to a happier constitution had perhaps 
come by nature. And regarded as training, 
it had one grave defect ; for it set me no 
standard of achievement. So that there was 
perhaps more profit, as there was certainly 
more effort, in my secret labours at home. 
Whenever I read a book or a passage that 
particularly pleased me, in which a thing 
was said or an effect rendered with propriety, 
in which there was either some conspicuous 
force or some happy distinction in the style, 
I must sit down at once and set myself to 
ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I 
knew it ; and tried again, and was again un- 
successful and always unsuccessful ; but at 
least in these vain bouts, I got some practice 
in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and 
the co-ordination of parts. I have thus played 
the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to 
Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to De- 
foe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baude- 
laire and to Obermann. I remember one of 
these monkey tricks, which was called 



Co Memories and Portraits 

The Vanity of Morals : it was to have had 
a second part, TJie Vanity of Knoivledge ; 
and as I had neither morality nor scholar- 
ship, the names were apt ; but the second 
part was never attempted, and the first part 
was written (which is my reason for recalling 
it, ghostlike, from its ashes) no less than 
three times : first in the manner of Hazlitt, 
second in the manner of Ruskin, who had 
cast on me a passing spell, and third, in a 
laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas Browne. 
So with my other works : Cain, an epic, was 
(save the mark !) an imitation of Sordello : 
Robin Hood, a tale in verse, took an eclectic 
middle course among the fields of Keats, 
Chaucer and Morris: in Monmouth, a tragedy, 
I reclined on the bosom of Mr. Swinburne ; 
in my innumerable gouty-footed lyrics, I fol- 
lowed many masters ; in the first draft of The 
Kings Pardon, a tragedy, I was on the trail 
of no lesser man than John Webster ; in the 
second draft of the same piece, with stagger- 
ing versatility, I had shifted my allegiance 
to Congreve, and of course conceived my 



A College Magazine 6i 

fable In a less serious vein — for it was not 
Congreve's verse, it was his exquisite prose, 
that I admired and sought to copy. Even 
at the age of thirteen I had tried to do 
justice to the inhabitants of the famous city 
of Peebles in the style of the Book of Snobs. 
So I might go on for ever, through all my 
abortive novels, and down to my later plays, 
of which I think more tenderly, for they 
were not only conceived at first under the 
bracing influence of old Dumas, but have 
met with resurrections : one, strangely bet- 
tered by another hand, came on the stage 
itself and was played by bodily actors ; the 
other, originally know as Semirainis : a 
Tragedy, I have observed on bookstalls under 
the alias of Prince Otto. But enough has 
been said to show by what arts of imperson- 
ation, and in what purely ventriloquial efforts 
I first saw my words on paper. 

That, like it or not, is the way to learn to 
write ; whether I have profited or not, that is 
the way. It was so Keats learned, and there 
was never a finer temperament for literature 



62 Memories and Portraits 

than Keats's ; it was so, if we could trace it 
out, that all men have learned ; and that is 
why a revival of letters is always accompanied 
or heralded by a cast back to earlier and 
fresher models. Perhaps I hear some one cry 
out : But this is not the way to be original ! 
It is not ; nor is there any way but to be 
born so. Nor yet, if you are born original, 
is there anything in this training that shall 
clip the wings of your originality. There 
can be none more original than Montaigne, 
neither could any be more unlike Cicero ; yet 
no craftsman can fail to see how much the 
one must have tried in his time to imitate the 
other. Burns is the very type of a prime 
force in letters : he was of all men the most 
imitative. Shakespeare himself, the imperial, 
proceeds directly from a school. It is only 
from a school that we can expect to have 
good writers ; it is almost invariably from a 
school that great writers, these lawless excep- 
tions, issue. Nor is there anything here that 
should astonish the considerate. Before he 
can tell what cadences he truly prefers, the 



A College Magazine $3 

student should have tried all that are pos- 
sible ; before he can choose and preserve a 
fitting key of words, he should long have 
practised the literary scales ; and it is only 
after years of such gymnastic that he can sit 
down at last, legions of words swarming to 
his call, dozens of turns of phrase simul- 
taneously bidding for his choice, and he 
himself knowing what he wants to do and 
(within the narrow limit of a man's ability) 
able to do it. 

And it is the great point of these imita- 
tions that there still shines byond t^he 
student's reach his inimitable model. Let 
him try as he please, he is still sure of failure; 
and it is a very old and a very true saying 
that failure is the only highroad to success. 
I must have had some disposition to learn ; 
for I clear-sightedly condemned my own 
performances. I liked doing them indeed ; 
but when they were done, I could see they 
were rubbish. In consequence, I very rarely 
showed them even to my friends ; and such 
friends as I chose to be my confidants I must 



64 Memories and Portraits 

have chosen well, for they had the friendliness 
to be quite plain with me. " Padding," said 
one. Another wrote : " I cannot understand 
why you do lyrics so badly." No more 
could I ! Thrice I put myself in the way 
of a more authoritative rebuff, by send- 
ing a paper to a magazine. These were 
returned ; and I was not surprised nor even 
pained. If they had not been looked at, as 
(like all amateurs) I suspected was the case, 
there was no good in repeating the experi- 
ment ; if they had been looked at — well, 
then I had not yet learned to write, and I 
must keep on learning and living. Lastly, I 
had a piece of good fortune which is the 
occasion of this paper, and by which I was 
able to see my literature in print, and to 
measure experimentally how far I stood from 
the favour of the public. 



A College Magazine 65 

II 

The' Speculative Society is a body of some 
antiquity, and has counted among its mem* 
bers Scott, Brougham, Jeffrey, Horner, Ben- 
jamin Constant, Robert Emmet, and many 
a legal and local celebrity besides. By an 
accident, variously explained, it has its 
rooms in the very buildings of the Univer- 
sity of Edinburgh : a hall, Turkey-carpeted, 
hung with pictures, looking, when lighted up 
at night with fire and candle, like some 
goodly dining-room ; a passage-like library, 
walled with books in their wire cages ; and a 
corridor with a fireplace, benches, a table, 
many prints of famous members, and a mural 
tablet to the virtues of a former secretary. 
Here a member can warm himself and loaf 
and read ; here, in defiance of Senatus-con- 
sults, he can smoke. The Senatus looks 
askance at these privileges ; looks even with 
a somewhat vinegar aspect on the whole 
society ; which argues a lack of proportion in 
the learned mind, for the world, we may be 

F 



66 Memories and Portraits 

sure, will prize far higher this haunt of dead 
lions than all the living dogs of the profes- 
sorate. 

■ I sat one December morning in the library 
of the Speculative ; a very humble -minded 
youth, though it was a virtue I never had 
much credit for ; yet proud of my privileges 
as a member of the Spec. ; proud of the pipe 
I was smoking in the teeth of the Senatus ; 
and in particular, proud of being in the next 
room to three very distinguished students, 
who were then conversing beside the corridor 
fire. One of these has now his name on the 
back of several volumes, and his voice, I 
learn, is influential in the law courts. Of 
the death of the second, you have just been 
reading what I had to say. And the third 
also has escaped out of that battle of life 
in which he fought so hard, it may be so 
unwisely. They were all three, as I have 
said, notable students ; but this was the 
most conspicuous. Wealthy, handsome, am- 
bitious, adventurous, diplomatic, a reader of 
Balzac, and of all men that I have known, 



A College Magazine 6y 

the most like to one of Balzac's characters, 
he led a life, and was attended by on ill 
fortune, that could be properly set forth only 
in the Coniedie Hiiinaine. He had then his 
eye on Parliament ; and soon after the time 
of which I write, he made a showy speech at 
a political dinner, was cried up to heaven 
next day in the Conraiit, and the day after 
was dashed lower than earth with a charge 
of plagiarism in the Scotsman. Report 
would have it (I daresay, very wrongly) that 
he was betrayed by one in whom he particu- 
larly trusted, and that the author of the 
charge had learned its truth from his own 
lips. Thus, at least, he was up one day on 
a pinnacle, admired and envied by all ; and 
the next, though still but a boy, he was 
publicly disgraced. The blow would have 
broken a less finely tempered spirit ; and 
even him I suppose it rendered reckless ; 
for he took flight to London, and there, in a 
fast club, disposed of the bulk of his con- 
siderable patrimony in the space of one 
winter. For years thereafter he lived I 



6S Memories and Port7^aits 

know not how ; always well dressed, always 
in good hotels and good society, always with 
empty pockets. The charm of his manner 
may have stood him in good stead ; but 
though my own manners are very agreeable, 
I have never found in them a source of 
livelihood ; and to explain the miracle of 
his continued existence, I must fall back 
upon the theory of the philosopher, that in 
his case, as in all of the same kind, "there 
was a suffering relative in the background." 
From this genteel eclipse he reappeared 
upon the scene, and presently sought me 
out in the character of a generous editor. 
It is in this part that I best remember him ; 
tall, slender, with a not ungraceful stoop ; 
looking quite like a refined gentleman, and 
quite like an urbane adventurer ; smiling 
with an engaging ambiguity ; cocking at you 
one peaked eyebrow with a great appearance 
of finesse ; speaking low and sweet and 
thick, with a touch of burr ; telling strange 
tales with singular deliberation and, to a 
patient listener, excellent effect. After all 



A College Magazine 6g 

these ups and downs, he seemed still, like 
the rich student that he was of yore, to 
breathe of money ; seemed still perfectly 
sure of himself and certain of his end. Yet 
he was then upon the brink of his last over- 
throw. He had set himself to found the 
strangest thing in our society : one of those 
periodical sheets from which men suppose 
themselves to learn opinions ; in which 
young gentlemen from the universities are 
encouraged, at so much a line, to garble 
facts, insult foreign nations and calumniate 
private individuals ; and which are now the 
source of glory, so that if a man's name be 
often enough printed there, he becomes a 
kind of demigod ; and people will pardon 
him when he talks back and forth, as they 
do for Mr. Gladstone ; and crowd him to 
suffocation on railway platforms, as they did 
the other day to General Boulanger; and buy 
his literary works, as I hope you have just 
done for me. Our fathers, when they were 
upon some great enterprise, would sacrifice a 
life ; building, it may be, a favourite slave 



70 Memories and Portraits 

into the foundations of their palace. It was 
with his own hfe that my companion dis- 
armed the envy of the gods. He fought his 
paper single-handed ; trusting no one, for he 
was something of a cynic ; up early and 
down late, for he was nothing of a sluggard ; 
daily ear-wigging influential men, for he was 
a master of ingratiation. In that slender 
and silken fellow there must have been a 
rare vein of courage, that he should thus 
have died at his employment ; and doubtless 
ambition spoke loudly in his ear, and doubt- 
less love also, for it seems there was a 
marriage in his view had he succeeded. But 
he died, and his paper died after him ; and 
of all this grace, and tact, and courage, it 
must seem to our blind eyes as if there had 
come literally nothing. 

These three students sat, as I was saying, 
in the corridor, under the mural tablet that 
records the virtues of IMacbean, the former 
secretary. We would often smile at that 
ineloquent memorial, and thought it a poor 
thing to come into the world at all and leave 



A College Magazine 71 

no more behind one than Macbean. And 
yet of these three, two are gone and have left 
less ; and this book, perhaps, when it is old 
and foxy, and some one picks it up in a 
corner of a book-shop, and glances through 
it, smiling at the old, graceless turns of 
speech, and perhaps for the love of Alma 
Mater (which may be still extant and flour- 
ishing) buys it, not without haggling, for 
some pence — this book may alone preserve 
a memory of James Walter Ferrier and 
Robert Glasgow Brown. 

Their thoughts ran very differently on 
that December morning ; they were all on 
fire with ambition ; and when they had 
called me in to them, and made me a 
sharer in their design, I too became drunken 
with pride and hope. We were to found a 
University magazine. A pair of little, active 
brothers — Livingstone by name, great skip- 
pers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, 
who kept a book -shop over against the 
University building — had been debauched 
to play the part of publishers. We four 



^2 Memoj^zes and Portraits 

were to be conjunct editors and, what was 
the main point of the concern, to print our 
own works ; while, by every rule of arith- 
metic — that flatterer of credulity — the ad- 
venture must succeed and bring great profit. 
Well, well : it was a bright vision. I went 
home that morning walking upon air. To 
have been chosen by these three distin- 
guished students was to me the most un- 
speakable advance ; it was my first draught 
of consideration ; it reconciled me to myself 
and to my fellow-men ; and as I steered 
round the railings at the Tron, I could not 
withhold my lips from smiling publicly. 
Yet, in the bottom of my heart, I knew 
that magazine would be a grim fiasco ; I 
knew it would not be worth reading ; I 
knew, even if it were, that nobody would 
read it ; and I kept wondering how I should 
be able, upon my compact income of twelve 
pounds per annum, payable monthly, to meet 
my share in the expense. It was a comfort- 
able thought to me that I had a father. 
The magazine appeared, in a yellow cover 



A College Magazine 73 

which was the best part of it, for at least it 
was unassuming ; it ran four months in un- 
disturbed obscurity, and died without a gasp. 
The first number was edited by all four of 
us with prodigious bustle ; the second fell 
principally into the hands of Ferrier and me; 
the third I edited alone; and it has long been 
a solemn question who it was that edited the 
fourth. It would perhaps be still more diffi- 
cult to say who read it. Poor yellow sheet, 
that looked so hopefully in the Livingstones' 
w^indow ! Poor, harmless paper, that might 
have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and 
was instead so clumsily defaced with non- 
sense ! And, shall I say. Poor Editors ? 
I cannot pity myself, to whom it was all 
pure gain. It was no news to me, but only 
the wholesome confirmation of my judgment, 
when the magazine struggled into half-birth, 
and instantly sickened and subsided into 
night. I had sent a copy to the lady with 
whom my heart was at that time somewhat 
engaged, and who did all that in her lay to 
break it ; and she, with some tact, passed 



74 Memories and Portraits 

over the gift and my cherished contributions 
in silence. I will not say that I was pleased 
at this ; but I will tell her now, if by any 
chance she takes up the work of her former 
servant, that I thought the better of her 
taste. I cleared the decks after this lost 
engagement ; had the necessary interview 
with my father, which passed off not amiss ; 
paid over my share of the expense to the 
two little, active brothers, who rubbed their 
hands as much, but methought skipped 
rather less than formerly, having perhaps, 
these two also, embarked upon the enter- 
prise with some graceful illusions ; and then, 
reviewing the whole episode, I told myself 
that the time was not yet ripe, nor the man 
ready ; and to work I went again with my 
penny version-books, having fallen back in 
one day from the printed author to the 
manuscript student. 



A College Magazine y 5 

III 

From this defunct periodical I am going 
to reprint one of my own papers. The poor 
Httle piece is all tail-foremost. I have done 
my best to straighten its array, I have 
pruned it fearlessly, and it remains inverte- 
brate and wordy. No self-respecting maga- 
zine would print the thing ; and here you 
behold it in a bound volume, not for any 
worth of its own, but for the sake of the 
man whom it purports dimly to represent 
and some of whose sayings it preserves ; so 
that in this volume of Memories and Por- 
traits, Robert Young, the Swanston gardener, 
may stand alongside of John Todd, the 
Swanston shepherd. Not that John and 
Robert drew very close together in their lives; 
for John was rough, he smelt of the windy 
brae ; and Robert was gentle, and smacked 
of the garden in the hollow. Perhaps it is 
to my shame that I liked John the better of 
the two ; he had grit and dash, and that salt 
of the Old Adam that pleases men with any 



^6 Memories and Portraits 

savage inheritance of blood ; and he was a 
wayfarer besides, and took my gipsy fancy. 
But however that may be, and however 
Robert's profile may be blurred in the boyish 
sketch that follows, he was a man of a most 
quaint and beautiful nature, whom, if it were 
possible to recast a piece of work so old, 
I should like well to draw again with a 
maturer touch. And as I think of him and 
of John, I wonder in what other country two 
such men would be found dwelling together, 
in a hamlet of some twenty cottages, in the 
woody fold of a green hill. 



V 

AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER 

T THINK I might almost have said the 
last : somewhere, indeed, in the utter- 
most glens of the Lammermuir or among the 
south-western hills there may yet linger a 
decrepid representative of this bygone good 
fellowship ; but as far as actual experience 
goes, I have only met one man in my life 
who might fitly be quoted in the same breath 
with Andrew Fairservice, — though without 
his vices. He was a man whose very pre- 
sence could impart a savour of quaint anti- 
quity to the baldest and most modern flower- 
plots. There was a dignity about his tall 
stooping form, and an earnestness in his 
wrinkled face that recalled Don Quixote ; 



yS Memories and Portraits 

but a Don Quixote who had come through 
the training of the Covenant, and been 
nourished in his youth on Walker's Lives and 
The Hind let Loose. 

Now, as I could not bear to let such a 
man pass away with no sketch preserved of 
his old-fashioned virtues, I hope the reader 
will take this as an excuse for the present 
paper, and judge as kindly as he can the 
infirmities of my description. To me, who 
find, it so difficult to tell the little that I know, 
he stands essentially as a genius loci. It is 
impossible to separate his spare form and old 
straw hat from the garden in the lap of the 
hill, with its rocks overgrown with clematis, 
its shadowy walks, and the splendid breadth 
of champaign that one saw from the north- 
west corner. The garden and gardener seem 
part and parcel of each other. When I take 
him from his right surroundings and try to 
make him appear for me on paper, he looks un- 
real and phantasmal : the best that I can say 
may convey some notion to those that never 
saw him, but to me it will be ever impotent. 



An Old Scotch Gardener 79 

The first time that I saw him, I fancy- 
Robert was pretty old ah'eady : he had cer- 
tainly begun to use his years as a stalking 
horse. Latterly he was beyond all the 
impudencies of logic, considering a reference 
to the parish register worth all the reasons 
in the world. '' / am old and well stricken in 
yearsl^ he was wont to say ; and I never 
found any one bold enough to answer the 
argument. Apart from this vantage that he 
kept over all who were not yet octogenarian, 
he had some other drawbacks as a gardener. 
He shrank the very place he cultivated. The 
dignity and reduced gentility of his appear- 
ance made the small garden cut a sorry 
figure. He was full of tales of greater 
situations in his younger days. He spoke of 
castles and parks with a humbling famili- 
arity. He told of places where under- 
gardeners had trembled at his looks, where 
there were meres and swanneries, labyrinths 
of walk and wildernesses of sad shrubbery in 
his control, till you could not help feeling 
that it was condescension on his part to dress 



8o Memo^Hes and Portraits 

your humbler garden plots. You were thrown 
at once into an invidious position. You felt 
that you were profiting by the needs of 
dignity, and that his poverty and not his will 
consented to your vulgar rule. Involuntarily 
you compared yourself with the swineherd 
that made Alfred watch his cakes, or some 
bloated citizen who may have given his sons 
and his condescension to the fallen Dionysius. 
Nor were the disagreeables purely fanciful 
and metaphysical, for the sway that he exer- 
cised over your feelings he extended to your 
garden, and, through the garden, to your 
diet. He would trim a hedge, throw away a 
favourite plant, or fill the most favoured and 
fertile section of the garden with a vegetable 
that none of us could eat, in supreme con- 
tempt for our opinion. If you asked him 
to send you in one of your own artichokes, 
" That I Willi, mem" he would say, " with 
pleasure, for it is mair blessed to give than to 
receiver Ay, and even when, by extra 
twisting of the screw, we prevailed on him 
to prefer our commands to his own in- 



An Old Scotch Gardener 8i 

clination, and he went away, stately and 
sad, professing that " our tvull was his plca- 
S2ire" but yet reminding us that he would 
do it " zvith feclhis^' — even then, I say, the 
triumphant master felt humbled in his 
triumph, felt that he ruled on sufferance 
only, that he was taking a mean advantage 
of the other's low estate, and that the whole 
scene had been one of those " slights that 
patient merit of the unworthy takes." 

In flowers his taste was old-fashioned 
and catholic ; affecting sunflowers and 
dahlias, wallflowers and roses, and hold- 
ing in supreme aversion whatsoever was fan- 
tastic, new-fashioned or wild. There was 
one exception to this sweeping ban. Fox- 
gloves, though undoubtedly guilty on the 
last count, he not only spared, but loved ; 
and when the shrubbery was being thinned, 
he stayed his hand and dexterously manipu- 
lated his bill in order to save every stately 
stem. In boyhood, as he told me once, 
speaking in that tone that only actors and 

the old-fashioned common folk can use now- 
G 



82 Memories and Portraits 

adays, his heart grew ''proud'' within him- 
when he came on a burn-course among the 
braes of Manor that shone purple with their 
graceful trophies ; and not all his apprentice- 
ship and practice for so many years of precise 
gardening had banished these boyish recol- 
lections from his heart. Indeed, he was a 
man keenly alive to the beauty of all that 
was bygone. He abounded in old stories of 
his boyhood, and kept pious account of all 
his former pleasures ; and when he went (on 
a holiday) to visit one of the fabled great 
places of the earth where he had served 
before,hecame back full of little pre-Raphaelite 
reminiscences that showed real passion for 
the past, such as might have shaken hands 
with Hazlitt or Jean-Jacques. 

But however his sympathy with his old 
feelings might affect his liking for the fox- 
gloves, the very truth was that he scorned 
all flowers together. They were but garnish- 
ings, childish toys, trifling ornaments for 
ladies' chimney-shelves. It was towards his 
cauliflowers and peas and cabbage that his 



An Old Scotch Gardener Z-^^ 

heart grew warm. His preference for the 
more useful growths was such that cabbages 
were found invading the flower-plots, and an 
outpost of savoys was once discovered in the 
centre of the lawn. He would prelect over 
some thriving plant with wonderful enthu- 
siasm, piling reminiscence on reminiscence 
of former and perhaps yet finer specimens. 
Yet even then he did not let the credit leave 
himself. He had, indeed, raised '^ finer d 
them ; " but it seemed that no one else had 
been favoured with a like success. All other 
gardeners, in fact, were mere foils to his own 
superior attainments ; and he would recount, 
with perfect soberness of voice and visage, 
how so and so had wondered, and such 
another could scarcely give credit to his 
eyes. Nor was it with his rivals only that 
he parted praise and blame. If you re- 
marked how well a plant was looking, he 
would gravely touch his hat and thank you 
with solemn unction ; all credit in the matter 
faUing to him. If, on the other hand, you 
called his attention to some back - going 



84 Memories and Portraits 

vegetable, he would quote Scripture : " Paid 
may plant and A polios may zvater ;'' all 
blame being left to Providence, on the score 
of deficient rain or untimely frosts. 

There was one thing in the garden that 
shared his preference with his favourite cab- 
baees and rhubarb, and that other was the 
bee-hive. Their sound, their industry, per- 
haps their sweet product also, had taken 
hold of his imagination and heart, whether 
by way of memory or no I cannot say, 
although perhaps the bees too were linked 
to him by some recollection of Manor braes 
and his country childhood. Nevertheless, 
he was too chary of his personal safety or 
(let me rather say) his personal dignity to 
mingle in any active office towards them. 
But he could stand by while one of the 
contemned rivals did the work for him, and 
protest that it was quite safe in spite of his 
own considerate distance and the cries of the 
distressed assistant. In regard to bees, he 
was rather a man of word than deed, and 
some of his most striking sentences had the 



An Old Scotch Gardener 85 

bees for text, " They are indeed wonderfiC 
creatures^ mem,'' he said once. " T/iey j'lcst 
mind me d what the Queen of Sheba said to 
Solomon — and I tJdnk she said it ivV a sigh, 
— ' The half of it hath not beeii told nnto me! " 
As far as the Bible goes, he was deeply 
read. Like the old Covenanters, of whom 
he was the worthy representative, his mouth 
was full of sacred quotations ; it was the 
book that he had studied most and thought 
upon most deeply. To many people in his 
station the Bible, and perhaps Burns, are the 
only books of any vital literary merit that 
they read, feeding themselves, for the rest, 
on the draff of country newspapers, and 
the very instructive but not very palatable 
pabulum of some cheap educational series. 
This was Robert's position. All day long 
he had dreamed of the Hebrew stories, and 
his head had been full of Hebrew poetry 
and Gospel ethics ; until they had struck 
deep root into his heart, and the very ex- 
pressions had become a part of him ; so that 
he rarely spoke without some antique idiom 



S6 Memories and Portraits 

or Scripture mannerism that gave a raciness 
to the merest triviahties of talk. But the 
influence of the Bible did not stop here. 
There was more in Robert than quaint 
phrase and ready store of reference. He 
was imbued with a spirit of peace and 
love : he interposed between man and 
wife : he threw himself between the angry, 
touching his hat the while with all the cere- 
mony of an usher : he protected the birds 
from everybody but himself, seeing, I sup- 
pose, a great difference between official 
execution and wanton sport. His mistress 
telling him one day to put some ferns into 
his master's particular corner, and adding, 
" Though, indeed, Robert, he doesn't deserve 
them, for he wouldn't help me to gather them," 
" Ek, mem" replies Robert, " but I woiddnae 
say that, for I think he's just a most deservm' 
gentleman^ Again, two of our friends, who 
were on intimate terms, and accustomed to 
use language to each other, somewhat without 
the bounds of the parliamentary, happened 
to differ about the position of a seat in the 



An Old Scotch Gardener Zj 

garden. The discussion, as was usual when 
these two were at it, soon waxed tolerably 
insulting on both sides. Every one accus- 
tomed to such controversies several times a 
day was quietly enjoying this prize-fight of 
somewhat abusive wit — every one but Robert, 
to whom the perfect good faith of the whole 
quarrel seemed unquestionable, and who, after 
having waited till his conscience would suffer 
him to wait no more, and till he expected 
every moment that the disputants would fall 
to blows, cut suddenly in with tones of 
almost tearful entreaty : " Eh^ but, gentlemen, 
I wad hae nae mair words about it ! " 
One thing was noticeable about Robert's 
religion : it was neither dogmatic nor sec- 
tarian. He never expatiated (at least, in 
my hearing) on the doctrines of his creed, 
and he never condemned anybody else. I 
have no doubt that he held all Roman 
Catholics, Atheists, and Mahometans as con- 
siderably out of it ; I don't believe he 
had any sympathy for Prelacy; and the 
natural feelings of man must have made him 



88 Memories and Portraits 

a little sore about Free-Churchism ; but at 
least, he never talked about these views, 
never grew controversially noisy, and never 
openly aspersed the belief or practice of any- 
body. Now all this is not generally charac- 
teristic of Scotch piety; Scotch sects being 
churches militant with a vengeance, and 
Scotch believers perpetual crusaders the one 
against the other, and missionaries the one 
to the other. Perhaps Robert's originally 
tender heart was what made the difference ; 
or, perhaps, his solitary and pleasant labour 
among fruits and flowers had taught him a 
more sunshiny creed than those whose work 
is among the tares of fallen humanity ; and 
the soft influences of the garden had entered 
deep into his spirit, 

"Annihilating all that's made 
To a green thought in a green shade." 

But I could go on for ever chronicling his 
golden sayings or telling of his innocent and 
living piety. I had meant to tell of his cot- 
tage, with the German pipe hung reverently 



An Old Scotch Gardener 89 

above the fire, and the shell box that he had 
made for his son, and of which he would 
say pathetically : " He was real pleased wi it 
at first, but I think lies got a kind d tired 
d it now" — the son being then a man of 
about forty. But I will let all these pass. 
" 'Tis more significant : he's dead." The 
earth, that he had digged so much in his 
life, was dug out by another for himself; 
and the flowers that he had tended drew their 
life still from him, but in a new and nearer 
way. A bird flew about the open grave, as 
if it too wished to honour the obsequies of one 
who had so often quoted Scripture in favour 
of its kind: "Are not two sparrows sold for 
one farthing, and yet not one of them falleth 
to the ground." 

Yes, he is dead. But the kings did not 
rise in the place of death to greet him " with 
taunting proverbs" as they rose to greet the 
haughty Babylonian ; for in his life he was 
lowly, and a peacemaker and a servant of 
God. 



VI 
PASTORAL 

'"PO leave home in early life is to be 
stunned and quickened with novelties ; 
but when years have come, it only casts a 
more endearing light upon the past. As in 
those composite photographs of Mr. Galton's, 
the image of each new sitter brings out but 
the more clearly the central features of the 
race ; when once youth has flown, each new 
impression only deepens the sense of na- 
tionality and the desire of native places. So 
may some cadet of Royal Ecossais or the 
Albany Regiment, as he mounted guard 
about French citadels, so may some officer 
marching his company of the Scots-Dutch 
among the polders, have felt the soft rains 



Pastoral 9 1 

of the Hebrides upon his brow, or started in 
the ranks at the remembered aroma of peat- 
smoke. And the rivers of home are dear 
in particular to all men. This is as old as 
Naaman, who was jealous for Abana and 
Pharpar ; it is confined to no race nor 
country, for I know one of Scottish blood 
but a child of Suffolk, whose fancy still 
lingers about the lilied lowland waters of 
that shire. But the streams of Scotland 
are incomparable in themselves — or I am 
only the more Scottish to suppose so — and 
their sound and colour dwell for ever in the 
memory. How often and willingly do I not 
look again in fancy on Tummel, or IManor, 
or the talking Airdle, or Dee swirling in its 
Lynn ; on the bright burn of Kinnaird, or 
the golden burn that pours and sulks in the 
den behind Kingussie ! I think shame to 
leave out one of these enchantresses, but 
the list would grow too long if I remembered 
all ; only I may not forget Allan Water, 
nor birch-wetting Rogie, nor yet Almond ; 
nor, for all its pollutions, that Water of Leith 



92 Memories and Portraits 

of the many and well-named mills — Bell's 
Mills, and Canon Mills, and Silver Mills ; 
nor Redford Burn of pleasant memories ; 
nor yet, for all its smallness, that nameless 
trickle that springs in the green bosom of 
Allermuir, and is fed from Halkerside with 
a perennial teacupful, and threads the moss 
under the Shearer's Knowe, and makes one 
pool there, overhung by a rock, where I 
loved to sit and make bad verses, and is 
then kidnapped in its infancy by subter- 
ranean pipes for the service of the sea- 
beholding city in the plain. From many 
points in the moss you may see at one 
glance its whole course and that of all its 
tributaries ; the geographer of this Lilliput 
may visit all its corners without sitting 
down, and not yet begin to be breathed ; 
Shearer's Knowe and Halkerside are but 
names of adjacent cantons on a single 
shoulder of a hill, as names are squandered 
(it would seem to the inexpert, in superfluity) 
upon these upland sheepwalks ; a bucket 
would receive the whole discharge of the toy 



Pastoral 9 3 

river ; it would take it an appreciable time 
to fill your morning bath ; for the most 
part, besides, it soaks unseen through the 
moss ; and yet for the sake of auld lang 
syne, and the figure of a certain genhts loci^ 
I am condemned to linger awhile in fancy 
by its shores ; and if the nymph (who 
cannot be above a span in stature) will but 
inspire my pen, I would gladly carry the 
reader along with me. 

John Todd, when I knew him, was already 
" the oldest herd on the Pentlands," and had 
been all his days faithful to that curlew- 
scattering, sheep-collecting life. He remem- 
bered the droving days, when the drove 
roads, that now lie green and solitary 
through the heather, were thronged thorough- 
fares. He had himself often marched flocks 
into England, sleeping on the hillsides with 
his caravan ; and by his account it was a 
rough business not without danger. The 
drove roads lay apart from habitation ; the 
drovers met in the wilderness, as to-day the 
deep-sea fishers meet off the banks in the 



94 Memories and Portraits 

solitude of the Atlantic ; and in the one as 
in the other case rough habits and fist-law 
were the rule. Crimes were committed, 
sheep filched, and drovers robbed and 
beaten ; most of which offences had a moor- 
land burial and were never heard of in the 
courts of justice. John, in those days, was 
at least once attacked, — by two men after 
his watch, — and at least once, betrayed by 
his habitual anger, fell under the danger of 
the law and was clapped into some rustic 
prison-house, the doors of which he burst 
in the night and was no more heard of in 
that quarter. When I knew him, his life 
had fallen in quieter places, and he had no 
cares beyond the dulness of his dogs and 
the inroads of pedestrians from town. But 
for a man of his propensity to wrath these 
were enough ; he knew neither rest nor 
peace, except by snatches ; in the gray of 
the summer morning, and already from far 
up the hill, he would wake the " toun " with 
the sound of his shoutings ; and in the 
lambing time, his cries were not yet silenced 



Pastoral 95 

late at night. This wrathful voice of a 
man unseen might be said to haunt that 
quarter of the Pentlands, an audible bogie ; 
and no doubt it added to the fear in which 
men stood of John a touch of something 
legendary. For my own part, he was at 
first my enemy, and I, in my character of a 
rambling boy, his natural abhorrence. It 
was long before I saw him near at hand, 
knowing him only by some sudden blast of 
bellowing from far above, bidding me 
" c'way oot amang the sheep." The 
quietest recesses of the hill harboured this 
ogre ; I skulked in my favourite wilderness 
like a Cameronian of the Killing Time, 
and John Todd was my Claverhouse, and 
his dogs my questing dragoons. Little 
by little we dropped into civilities ; his hail 
at sight of me began to have less of the 
ring of a war -slogan ; soon, we never met 
but he produced his snuff-box, which was 
with him, like the calumet with the Red 
Indian, a part of the heraldry of peace ; 
and at length, in the ripeness of time, we 



gO Memories and Portraits 

grew to be a pair of friends, and when I 
lived alone in these parts in the winter, it 
was a settled thing for John to " give me a 
cry " over the garden wall as he set forth 
upon his evening round, and for me to over- 
take and bear him company. 

That dread voice of his that shook the 
hills when he was angry, fell in ordinary talk 
very pleasantly upon the ear, with a kind of 
honied, friendly whine, not far off singing, 
that was eminently Scottish. He laughed 
not very often, and when he did, with a 
sudden, loud haw-haw, hearty but somehow 
joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face 
was permanently set and coloured ; ruddy 
and stiff with weathering ; more like a 
picture than a face ; yet with a certain strain 
and a threat of latent anger in the expres- 
sion, like that of a man trained too fine and 
harassed with perpetual vigilance. He spoke 
in the richest dialect of Scotch I ever 
heard ; the words in themselves were a 
pleasure and often a surprise to me, so that 
I often came back from one of our patrols 



Pastoral 97 

with new acquisitions ; and this vocabulary 
he would handle like a master, stalking a 
little before me, " beard on shoulder," the 
plaid hanging loosely about him, the yellow 
staff clapped under his arm, and guiding me 
uphill by that devious, tactical ascent which 
seems peculiar to men of his trade. I might 
count him with the best talkers ; only that 
talking Scotch and talking English seem 
incomparable acts. He touched on nothing 
at least, but he adorned it ; when he narrated, 
the scene was before you ; when he spoke 
(as he did mostly) of his own antique busi- 
ness, the thing took on a colour of romance 
and curiosity that was surprising. The 
clans of sheep with their particular territories 
on the hill, and how, in the yearly killings 
and purchases, each must be proportionally 
thinned and strengthened ; the midnight 
busyness of animals, the signs of the weather, 
the cares of the snowy season, the exquisite 
stupidity of sheep, the exquisite cunning of 
dogs : all these he could present so humanly, 

and with so much old experience and living 
H 



98 Me7nories and Portraits 

gusto, that weariness was excluded. And in 
the midst he would suddenly straighten his 
bowed back, the stick would fly abroad in 
demonstration, and the sharp thunder of his 
voice roll out a long itinerary for the dogs, 
so that you saw at last the use of that great 
wealth of names for every knowe and howe 
upon the hillside ; and the dogs, having 
hearkened with lowered tails and raised faces, 
would run up their flags again to the mast- 
head and spread themselves upon the indi- 
cated circuit. It used to fill me with wonder 
how they could follow and retain so long a 
story. But John denied these creatures all 
intelligence ; they were the constant butt of 
his passion and contempt ; it was just pos- 
sible to work with the like of them, he said, 
— not more than possible. And then he 
would expand upon the subject of the really 
good dogs that he had known, and the one 
really good dog that he had himself possessed. 
He had been offered forty pounds for it ; but 
a good collie was worth more than that, 
more than anything, to a " herd ; " he did the 



Pastoral 99 

herd's work Tor him. "As for the like of 
them ! " he would cry, and scornfully indicate 
the scouring tails of his assistants. 

Once — I translate John's Lallan, for I 
cannot do it justice, being born Britamiis in 
moiitibus, indeed, but alas ! ineriidito scemlo 
— once, in the days of his good dog, he had 
bought some sheep in Edinburgh, and on the 
way out, the road being crowded, two were 
lost. This was a reproach to John, and a 
slur upon the dog ; and both were alive to 
their misfortune. Word came, after some 
days, that a farmer about Braid had found a 
pair of sheep ; and thither went John and 
the dog to ask for restitution. But the 
farmer was a hard man and stood upon his 
rights. " How were they marked ? " he 
asked ; and since John had bought right and 
left from many sellers and had no notion of 
the marks — "Very well," said the farmer, 
" then it's only right that I should keep 
them."— "Well," said John, " it's a fact that 
I cannae tell the sheep ; but if my dog can, 
will ye let me have them ? " The farmer 



I oo Memories a7id Portraits 

was honest as well as hard, and besides I 
daresay he had little fear of the ordeal ; so 
he had all the sheep upon his farm into one 
large park, and turned John's dog into their 
midst. That hairy man of business knew 
his errand well ; he knew that John and he 
had bought two sheep and (to their shame) 
lost them about Boroughmuirhead ; he knew 
besides (the Lord knows how, unless by 
listening) that they were come to Braid for 
their recovery ; and without pause or blunder 
singled out, first one and then another, the 
two waifs. It was that afternoon the forty 
pounds were offered and refused. And the 
shepherd and his dog — what do I say? the 
true shepherd and his man— set off together 
by Fairmilehead in jocund humour, and 
" smiled to ither " all the way home, with the 
two recovered ones before them. So far, so 
good ; but intelligence may be abused. The 
dog, as he is by little man's inferior in mind, 
is only by little his superior in virtue ; and 
John had another collie tale of quite a 
different complexion. At the foot of the 



Pastoral i o i 

moss behind Kirk Yetton (Caer Ketton, wise 
men say) there is a scrog of low wood and a 
pool with a dam for washing sheep. John 
was one day lying under a bush in the scrog, 
when he was aware of a collie on the far 
hillside skulking down through the deepest 
of the heather with obtrusive stealth. He 
knew the dog ; knew him for a clever, rising 
practitioner from quite a distant farm ; one 
whom perhaps he had coveted as he saw him 
masterfully steering flocks to market. But 
what did the practitioner so far from home ? 
and why this guilty and secret manoeuvring 
towards the pool ? — for it was towards the 
pool that he was heading. John lay the 
closer under his bush, and presently saw the 
dog come forth upon the margin, look all 
about to see if he were anywhere observed, 
plunge in ,and repeatedly wash himself over 
head and ears, and then (but now openly 
and with tail in air) strike homeward over 
the hills. That same night word was sent 
his master, and the rising practitioner, 
shaken up from where he lay, all innocence 



1 02 Memories and Portraits 

before the fire, was had out to a dykeside 
and promptly shot ; for alas ! he was that 
foulest of criminals under trust, a sheep-eater; 
and it was from the maculation of sheep's 
blood that he had come so far to cleanse 
himself in the pool behind Kirk Yetton. 

A trade that touches nature, one that lies 
at the foundations of life, in which we have 
all had ancestors employed, so that on a hint 
of it ancestral memories revive, lends itself to 
literary use, vocal or written. The fortune 
of a tale lies not alone in the skill of him 
that writes, but as much, perhaps, in the in- 
herited experience of him who reads; and 
when I hear with a particular thrill of things 
that I have never done or seen, it is one of 
that innumerable army of my ancestors re- 
joicing in past deeds. Thus novels begin 
to touch not the fine dilettanti but the gross 
mass of mankind, when they leave off to 
speak of parlours and shades of manner 
and still-born niceties of motive, and begin 
to deal with fighting, sailoring, adventure, 
death or child-birth ; and thus ancient out- 



Pastoral 103 

door crafts and occupations, whether Mr. 
Hardy wields the shepherd's crook or Count 
Tolstoi swings the scythe, lift romance into 
a near neighbourhood with epic. These 
aged things have on them the dew of man's 
morning ; they lie near, not so much to us, 
the semi-artificial flowerets, as to the trunk 
and aboriginal taproot of the race. A 
thousand interests spring up in the process 
of the ages, and a thousand perish ; that is 
now an eccentricity or a lost art which was 
once the fashion of an empire ; and those 
only are perennial matters that rouse us to- 
day, and that roused men in all epochs of 
the past. There is a certain critic, not 
indeed of execution but of matter, whom I 
dare be known to set before the best : a certain 
low-browed, hairy gentleman, at first a percher 
in the fork of trees, next (as they relate) a 
dweller in caves, and whom I think I see 
squatting in cave-mouths, of a pleasant after- 
noon, to munch his berries — his wife, that 
accomplished lady, squatting by his side : 
his name I never heard, but he is often 



1 04 Memories and Portraits 

described as Probably Arboreal, which may 
serve for recognition. Each has his own 
tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits 
Probably Arboreal; in all our 'veins there 
run some minims of his old, wild, tree-top 
blood ; our civilised nerves still tingle with 
his rude terrors and pleasures ; and to that 
which would have moved our common an- 
cestor, all must obediently thrill. 

We have not so far to climb to come to 
shepherds ; and it may be I had one for an 
ascendant who has largely moulded me. 
But yet I think I owe my taste for that hill- 
side business rather to the art and interest 
of John Todd. He it was that made it live 
for me, as the artist can make all things live. 
It was through him the simple strategy 
of massing sheep upon a snowy evening, with 
its attendant scampering of earnest, shaggy 
aides-de-camp, was an affair that I never 
wearied of seeing, and that I never weary of 
recalling to mind : the shadow of the night 
darkening on the hills, inscrutable black blots 
of snow shower moving here and there like 



Pastoral 105 

night already come, huddles of yellow sheep 
and dartings of black dogs upon the snow, a 
bitter air that took you by the throat, un- 
earthly harpings of the wind along the 
moors ; and for centre piece to all these 
features and influences, John winding up the 
brae, keeping his captain's eye upon all 
sides, and breaking, ever and again, into a 
spasm of bellowing that seemed to make the 
evening bleaker. It is thus that I still see 
him in my mind's eye, perched on a hump of 
the declivity not far from Halkerside, his 
staff in airy flourish, his great voice taking 
hold upon the hills and echoing terror to the 
lowlands ; I, meanwhile, standing somewhat 
back, until the fit should be over, and, with a 
pinch of snuff, my friend relapse into his 
easy, even conversation. 



VII 

THE MANSE 

T HAVE named, among many rivers that 
make music in my memory, that dirty 
Water of Leith. Often and often I desire 
to look upon it again ; and the choice of a 
point of view is easy to me. It should be 
at a certain water-door, embowered in shrub- 
bery. The river is there dammed back for 
the service of the flour-mill just below, so 
that it lies deep and darkling, and the sand 
slopes into brown obscurity with a glint of 
gold ; and it has but newly been recruited 
by the borrowings of the snuff-mill just 
above, and these, tumbling merrily in, shake 
the pool to its black heart, fill it with drowsy 
eddies, and set the curded froth of many 



The Manse 107 

other mills solemnly steering to and fro 
upon the surface. Or so it was when I was 
young ; for change, and the masons, and the 
pruning -knife, have been busy ; and if I 
could hope to repeat a cherished experience, 
it must be on many and impossible condi- 
tions. I must choose, as well as the point 
of view, a certain moment in my growth, 
so that the scale may be exaggerated, and 
the trees on the steep opposite side may 
seem to climb to heaven, and the sand by 
the water-door, where I am standing, seem 
as low as Styx. And I must choose the 
season also, so that the valley may be 
brimmed like a cup with sunshine and the 
songs of birds ; — and the year of grace, so 
that when I turn to leave the riverside I may 
find the old manse and its inhabitants 
unchanged. 

It was a place in that time like no other : 
the garden cut into provinces by a great 
hedge of beech, and overlooked by the 
church and the terrace of the churchyard, 
where the tombstones were thick, and after 



1 08 Memories and Portraits 

nightfall "spunkies" might be seen to dance, 
at least by children ; flower-plots lying warm 
in sunshine ; laurels and the great yew mak- 
ing elsewhere a pleasing horror of shade ; 
the smell of water rising from all round, with 
an added tang of paper-mills ; the sound of 
water everywhere, and the sound of mills — 
the wheel and the dam singing their alternate 
strain ; the birds on every bush and from 
every corner of the overhanging woods peal- 
ing out their notes until the air throbbed 
with them ; and in the midst of this, the 
manse. I see it, by the standard of my 
childish stature, as a great and roomy house. 
In truth, it was not so large as I supposed, 
nor yet so convenient, and, standing where it 
did, it is difficult to suppose that it was 
healthful. Yet a large family of stalwart 
sons and tall daughters was housed and 
reared, and came to man and womanhood in 
that nest of little chambers ; so that the face 
of the earth was peppered with the children 
of the manse, and letters with outlandish 
stamps became familiar to the local postman, 



The Manse 109 

and the walls of the little chambers bright- 
ened with the wonders of the East. The 
dullest could see this was a house that had a 
pair of hands in divers foreign places : a 
well-beloved house — its image fondly dwelt 
on by many travellers. 

Here lived an ancestor of mine, who 
was a herd of men. I read him, judging 
with older criticism the report of childish 
observation, as a man of singular simplicity 
of nature ; unemotional, and hating the dis- 
play of what he felt ; standing contented on 
the old ways ; a lover of his life and innocent 
habits to the end. We children admired 
him : partly for his beautiful face and silver 
hair, for none more than children are con- 
cerned for beauty and, above all, for beauty 
in the old ; partly for the solemn light in 
which we beheld him once a week, the 
observed of all observers, in the pulpit. But 
his strictness and distance, the effect, I now 
fancy, of old age, slow blood, and settled 
habit, oppressed us with a kind of terror. 
When not abroad, he sat much alone, writing 



1 1 o Memories and Portraits 

sermons or letters to his scattered family in 
a dark and cold room with a library of 
bloodless books — or so they seemed in those 
days, although I have some of them now on 
my own shelves and like well enough to 
read them ; and these lonely hours wrapped 
him in the greater gloom for our imagina- 
tions. But the study had a redeeming grace 
in many Indian pictures, gaudily coloured 
and dear to young eyes. I cannot depict 
(for I have no such passions now) the greed 
with which I beheld them ; and when I was 
once sent in to say a psalm to my grand- 
father, I went, quaking indeed with fear, but 
at the same time glowing with hope that, if 
I said it well, he might reward me with an 
Indian picture. 

•' Thy foot He'll not let slide, nor will 
He slumber that thee keeps," 

it ran : a strange conglomerate of the un- 
pronounceable, a sad model to set in child- 
hood before one who was himself to be a 
versifier, and a task in recitation that really 
merited reward. And I must suppose the 



The Manse 1 1 1 

old man thought so too, and was either 
touched or amused by the performance ; for 
he took me in his arms with most unwonted 
tenderness, and kissed me, and gave me a 
Httle kindly sermon for my psalm ; so that, 
for that day, we were clerk and parson. I 
was struck by this reception into so tender a 
surprise that I forgot my disappointment. 
And indeed the hope was one of those that 
childhood forges for a pastime, and with no 
design upon reality. Nothing was more 
unlikely than that my grandfather should 
strip himself of one of those pictures, love- 
gifts and reminders of his absent sons ; 
nothing more unlikely than that he should 
bestow it upon me. He had no idea of 
spoiling children, leaving all that to my 
aunt ; he had fared hard himself, and blub- 
bered under the rod in the last century ; 
and his ways were still Spartan for the 
young. The last word I heard upon his 
lips was in this Spartan key. He had over- 
walked in the teeth of an east wind, and was 
now near the end of his many days. He 



1 1 2 Memories and Portraits 

sat by the dining-room fire, with his white 
hair, pale face and bloodshot eyes, a some- 
what awful figure ; and my aunt had given 
him a dose of our good old Scotch medicine, 
Dr. Gregory's powder. Now that remedy, 
as the work of a near kinsman of Rob Roy 
himself, may have a savour of romance for 
the imagination ; but it comes uncouthly to 
the palate. The old gentleman had taken 
it with a wry face ; and that being accom- 
plished, sat with perfect simplicity, like a 
child's, munching a " barley-sugar kiss." But 
when my aunt, having the canister open in 
her hands, proposed to let me share in the 
sweets, he interfered at once. I had had no 
Gregory ; then I should have no barley- 
sugar kiss : so he decided with a touch of 
irritation. And just then the phaeton coming 
opportunely to the kitchen door — for such 
was our unlordly fashion — I was taken for 
the last time from the presence of my grand- 
father. 

Now I often wonder what I have inherited 
from this old minister. I must suppose, 



The Manse 1 1 3 

indeed, that he was fond of preaching- 
sermons, and so am I, though I never heard 
it maintained that either of us loved to hear 
them. He sought health in his youth in the 
Isle of Wight, and I have sought it in both 
hemispheres ; but whereas he found and 
kept it, I am still on the quest. He was a 
great lover of Shakespeare, whom he read 
aloud, I have been told, with taste ; well, I 
love my Shakespeare also, and am persuaded 
I can read him well, though I own I never 
have been told so. He made embroidery, 
designing his own patterns ; and in that kind 
of work I never made anything but a kettle- 
holder in Berlin wool, and an odd garter of 
knitting, which was as black as the chimney 
before I had done with it. He loved port, 
and nuts, and porter ; and so do I, but they 
agreed better with my grandfather, which 
seems to me a breach of contract. He had 
chalk-stones in his fingers ; and these, in 
good time, I may possibly inherit, but I 
would much rather have inherited his noble 
presence. Try as I please, I cannot join 



1 1 4 Me?nories and Portraits 

myself on with the reverend doctor ; and all 
the while, no doubt, and even as I write the 
phrase, he moves in my blood, and whispers 
words to me, and sits efficient in the very 
knot and centre of my being. In his garden, 
as I played there, I learned the love of mills 
— or had I an ancestor a miller ? — and a 
kindness for the neighbourhood of graves, as 
homely things not without their poetry — or 
had I an ancestor a sexton ? But what of 
the garden where he played himself? — for 
that, too, was a scene of my education. Some 
part of me played there in the eighteenth 
century, and ran races under the green 
avenue at Pilrig ; some part of me trudged 
up Leith Walk, which was still a country 
place, and sat on the High School benches, 
and was thrashed, perhaps, by Dr. Adam. 
The house where I spent my youth was not 
yet thought upon ; but we made holiday 
parties among the cornfields on its site, and 
ate strawberries and cream near by at a 
gardener's. All this I had forgotten ; only 
my grandfather remembered and once re- 



The Manse 1 1 5 

minded me. I have forgotten, too, how we 
grew up, and took orders, and went to our 
first Ayrshire parish, and fell in love with 
and married a daughter of Burns's Dr. Smith 
— " Smith opens out his cauld harangues." 
I have forgotten, but I was there all the 
same, and heard stories of Burns at first 
hand. 

And there is a thing stranger than all 
that ; for this homunadtcs or part-man of 
mine that walked about the eighteenth century 
with Dr. Balfour in his youth, was in the way 
of meeting other homunculos or part-men, in 
the persons of my other ancestors. These 
were of a lower order, and doubtless we 
looked down upon them duly. But as I 
went to college with Dr. Balfour, I may have 
seen the lamp 'and oil man taking down the 
shutters from his shop beside the Tron ; — we 
may have had a rabbit-hutch or a bookshelf 
made for us by a certain carpenter in I know 
not what wynd of the old, smoky city; or, 
upon some holiday excursion, we may have 
looked into the windows of a cottage in a 



1 1 6 Memories and Portraits 

flower-garden and seen a certain weaver ply- 
ing his shuttle. And these were all kinsmen 
of mine upon the other side ; and from the 
eyes of the lamp and oil man one-half of my 
unborn father, and one-quarter of myself, 
looked out upon us as we went by to college. 
Nothing of all this would cross the mind of 
the young student, as he posted up the 
Bridges with trim, stockinged legs, in that 
city of cocked hats and good Scotch still un- 
adulterated. It would not cross his mind 
that he should have a daughter ; and the 
lamp and oil man, just then beginning, by a 
not unnatural metastasis, to bloom into a 
lighthouse-engineer, should have a grandson ; 
and that these two, in the fulness of time, 
should wed ; and some portion of that 
student himself should survive yet a year or 
two longer in the person of their child. 

But our ancestral adventures are beyond 
even the arithmetic of fancy; and it is the 
chief recommendation of long pedigrees, that 
we can follow backward the careers of our 
homunculos and be reminded of our antenatal 



The Manse 1 1 7 

lives. Our conscious years are but a moment 
in the history of the elements that build us. 
Are you a bank-clerk, and do you live at 
Peckham ? It was not always so. And 
though to-day I am only a man of letters, 
either tradition errs or I was present when 
there landed at St. Andrews a French 
barber-surgeon, to tend the health and the 
beard of the great Cardinal Beaton ; I have 
shaken a spear in the Debateable Land and 
shouted the slogan of the Elliots ; I was 
present when a skipper, plying from Dundee, 
smuggled Jacobites to France after the '15 ; 
I was in a West India merchant's office, per- 
haps next door to Bailie Nichol Jarvie's, and 
managed the business of a plantation in St. 
Kitt's ; I was with my engineer-grandfather 
(the son-in-law of the lamp and oil man) 
when he sailed north about Scotland on the 
famous cruise that gave us the Pirate and 
the Lord of the Isles ; I was with him, 
too, on the Bell Rock, in the fog, when the 
Sineaton had drifted from her moorin2|-s, and 
the Aberdeen men, pick in hand, had seized 



1 1 8 Memories and Portraits 

upon the only boats, and he must stoop and 
lap sea-water before his tongue could utter 
audible words ; and once more with him 
when the Bell Rock beacon took a " thrawe," 
and his workmen fled into the tower, then 
nearly finished, and he sat unmoved reading 
in his Bible — or affecting to read — till one 
after another slunk back with confusion of 
countenance to their engineer. Yes, parts of 
me have seen life, and met adventures, and 
sometimes met them well. And away in the 
still cloudier past, the threads that make me 
up can be traced by fancy into the bosoms 
of thousands and millions of ascendants : 
Picts who rallied round Macbeth and the old 
(and highly preferable) system of descent by 
females, fleers from before the legions of 
Agricola, marchers in Pannonian morasses, 
star-gazers on Chaldaean plateaus ; and, 
furthest of all, what face is this that fancy 
can see peering through the disparted 
branches ? What sleeper in green tree-tops, 
what muncher of nuts, concludes my pedi- 
gree ? Probably arboreal in his habits. . . . 



The Manse 1 1 9 

And I know not which is the more strange, 
that I should carry about with me some fibres 
of my minister-grandfather ; or that in him, 
as he sat in his cool study, grave, reverend, 
contented gentleman, there was an aboriginal 
frisking of the blood that was not his ; tree- 
top memories, like undeveloped negatives, 
lay dormant in his mind ; tree-top instincts 
awoke and were trod down ; and Probably 
Arboreal (scarce to be distinguished from a 
monkey) gambolled and chattered in the 
brain of the old divine. 



VIII 

MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET 

'T^HOSE who try to be artists use, time 
after time, the matter of their recol- 
lections, setting and resetting little coloured 
memories of men and scenes, rigging up (it 
may be) some especial friend in the attire 
of a buccaneer, and decreeing armies to 
manoeuvre, or murder to be done, on the 
playground of their youth. But the memo- 
ries are a fairy gift which cannot be worn 
out in using. After a dozen services in 
various tales, the little sunbright pictures of 
the past still shine in the mind's eye with 
not a lineament defaced, not a tint impaired. 
Gliick tuid 7tngliick zuird gesang^ if Goethe 
pleases ; yet only by endless avatars, the 



Memoirs of an Islet 121 

original re-embodying after each. So that 
a writer, in time, begins to wonder at the 
perdurable life of these impressions ; begins, 
perhaps, to fancy that he wrongs them when 
he weaves them in with fiction ; and looking 
back on them with ever-growing kindness, 
puts them at last, substantive jewels, in a 
setting of their own. 

One or two of these pleasant spectres I 
think I have laid. I used one but the other 
day : a little eyot of dense, freshwater sand, 
where I once waded deep in butterburrs, 
delighting to hear the song of the river on 
both sides, and to tell myself that I was 
indeed and at last upon an island. Two 
of my puppets lay there a summer's day, 
hearkening to the shearers at work in river- 
side fields and to the drums of the gray old 
garrison upon the neighbouring hill. And 
this was, I think, done rightly : the place 
was rightly peopled — and now belongs not to 
me but to my puppets — for a time at least. 
In time, perhaps, the puppets will grow 
faint ; the original memory swim up instant 



12 2 Memories and Portraits 

as ever ; and I shall once more lie in bed, 
and see the little sandy isle in Allan Water 
as it is in nature, and the child (that once 
was me) wading there in butterburrs ; and 
wonder at the instancy and virgin freshness 
of that memory ; and be pricked again, in 
season and out of season, by the desire to 
weave it into art. 

There is another isle in my collection, the 
memory of which besieges me. I put a 
whole family there, in one of my tales ; and 
later on, threw upon its shores, and condemned 
to several days of rain and shellfish on its 
tumbled boulders, the hero of another. The 
ink is not yet faded ; the sound of the sen- 
tences is still in my mind's ear ; and I am 
under a spell to write of that island again. 



The little isle of Earraid lies close in to 
the south-west corner of the Ross of Mull : 
the sound of lona on one side, across which 
you may see the isle and church of Columba ; 



Memoirs of an Islet 123 

the open sea to the other, where you shall 
be able to mark, on a clear, surfy day, the 
breakers running white on many sunken 
rocks. I first saw it, or first remember see- 
ing it, framed in the round bull's-eye of a 
cabin port, the sea lying smooth along its 
shores like the waters of a lake, the colour- 
less, clear light of the early morning making 
plain its heathery and rocky hummocks. 
There stood upon it, in these days, a single 
rude house of uncemented stones, approached 
by a pier of wreckwood. It must have been 
very early, for it was then summer, and 
in summer, in that latitude, day scarcely with- 
draws ; but even at that hour the house was 
making a sweet smoke of peats which came 
to me over the bay, and the bare-legged 
daughters of the cotter were wading by the 
pier. The same day we visited the shores 
of the isle in the ship's boats ; rowed deep 
into Fiddler's Hole, sounding as we went ; 
and having taken stock of ail possible ac- 
commodation, pitched on the northern inlet 
as the scene of operations. For it was no 



1 24 Memories a7id For trails 

accident that had brought the h'ghthouse 
steamer to anchor in the Bay of Earraid. 
Fifteen miles away to seaward, a certain 
black rock stood environed by the Atlantic 
rollers, the outpost of the Torran reefs. Here 
was a tower to be built, and a star lighted, 
for the conduct of seamen. But as the rock 
was small, and hard of access, and far from 
land, the work would be one of years ; and 
my father was now looking for a shore 
station, where the stones might be quarried 
and dressed, the men live, and the tender, 
with some degree of safety, lie at anchor. 

I saw Earraid next from the stern thwart 
of an lona lugger, Sam Bough and I sitting 
there cheek by jowl, with our feet upon our 
baggage, in a beautiful, clear, northern sum- 
mer eve. And behold ! there was now a 
pier of stone, there were rows of sheds, rail- 
ways, travelling-cranes, a street of cottages, 
an iron house for the resident engineer, 
wooden bothies for the men, a stage where 
the courses of the tower were put together 
experimentally, and behind the settlement a 



Memoirs of an Islet 1 2 5 

great gash in the hillside where granite 
was quarried. In the bay, the steamer lay 
at her moorings. All day long there hung 
about the place the music of chinking tools ; 
and even in the dead of night, the watchman 
carried his lantern to and fro in the dark 
settlement, and could light the pipe of any 
midnight muser. It was, above all, strange 
to see Earraid on the Sunday, when the 
sound of the tools ceased and there fell a 
crystal quiet. All about the green compound 
men would be sauntering in their Sunday's 
best, walking with those lax joints of the 
reposing toiler, thoughtfully smoking, talking 
small, as if in honour of the stillness, or 
hearkening to the wailing of the gulls. And 
it was strange to see our Sabbath services, 
held, as they were, in one of the bothies, 
with Mr. Brebner reading at a table, and the 
congregation perched about in the double 
tier of sleeping bunks ; and to hear the 
singing of the psalms, " the chapters," the 
inevitable Spurgeon's sermon, and the old, 
eloquent lighthouse prayer. 



1 26 Memories and Portraits 

In fine weather, when by the spy-glass on 
the hill the sea was observed to run low 
upon the reef, there would be a sound of 
preparation in the very early morning ; and 
before the sun had risen from behind Ben 
More, the tender would steam out of the bay. 
Over fifteen sea -miles of the great blue 
Atlantic rollers she ploughed her way, trail- 
ing at her tail a brace of wallowing stone- 
lighters. The open ocean widened upon 
either board, and the hills of the mainland 
began to go down on the horizon, before she 
came to her unhomely destination, and lay-to 
at last where the rock clapped its black head 
above the swell, with the tall iron barrack on 
its spider legs, and the truncated tower, and the 
cranes waving their arms, and the smoke of 
the engine-fire rising in the mid-sea. An ugly 
reef is this of the Dhu Heartach ; no pleasant 
assemblage of shelves, and pools, and creeks, 
about w^hich a ohild might play for a whole 
summer without weariness, like the Bell 
Rock or the Skerryvore, but one oval 
nodule of black -trap, sparsely bedabbled 



Memoirs of an Islet 1 2 7 

with an inconspicuous fucus, and alive in 
every crevice with a dingy insect between a 
slater and a bug-. No other life was there 
but that of sea-birds, and of the sea itself, 
that here ran like a mill-race, and growled 
about the outer reef for ever, and ever and 
again, in the calmest weather, roared and 
spouted on the rock itself Times were 
different upon Dhu Heartach when it blew, 
and the night fell dark, and the neigh- 
bour lights of Skerryvore and Rhu-val were 
quenched in fog, and the men sat prisoned 
high up in their iron drum, that then re- 
sounded with the lashing of the sprays. Fear 
sat with them in their sea-beleaguered dwell- 
ing ; and the colour changed in anxious 
faces when some greater billow struck the 
barrack, and its pillars quivered and sprang 
under the blow. It was then that the fore- 
man builder, Mr. Goodwillie, whom I see 
before me still in his rock-habit of undecipher- 
able rags, would get his fiddle down and 
strike up human minstrelsy amid the music 
of the storm. But it was in sunshine only 



12 8 Memo7nes and Portraits 

that I saw Dhu-Heartach; and it was in sun- 
shine, or the yet lovelier summer afterglow, 
that the steamer would return to Earraid, 
ploughing an enchanted sea ; the obedient 
lighters, relieved of their deck cargo, riding 
in her wake more quietly; and the steersman 
upon each, as she. rose on the long swell, 
standing tall and dark against the shining 
west. 

II 

But it was in Earraid itself that I delighted 
chiefly. The lighthouse settlement scarce 
encroached beyond its fences ; over the top 
of the first brae the ground was all virgin, 
the world all shut out, the face of things un- 
changed by any of man's doings. Here was 
no living presence, save for the limpets on 
the rocks, for some old, gray, rain-beaten 
ram that I might rouse out of a ferny den 
betwixt two boulders, or for the haunting 
and the piping of the gulls. It was older 
than man ; it was found so by incoming 
Celts, and seafaring Norsemen, and Columba's 



Memoirs of an Islet 129 

priests. The earthy savour of the bog plants, 
the rude disorder of the boulders, the inimit- 
able seaside brightness of the air, the brine 
and the iodine, the lap of the billows among 
the weedy reefs, the sudden springing up of 
a great run of dashing surf along the sea- 
front of the isle, all that I saw and felt my 
predecessors must have seen and felt with 
scarce a difference. I steeped myself in 
open air and in past ages. 

*' Delightful would it be to me to be in Uchd Ailiun 

On the pinnacle of a rock, 
That I might often see 

The face of the ocean ; 
That I might hear the song of the wonderful birds, 

Source of happiness ; 
That I might hear the thunder of the crowding waves 

Upon the rocks : 
At times at work without compulsion — 

This would be delightful ; 
At times plucking dulse from the rocks ; 

At times at fishing." 

So, about the next island of lona, sang 
Columba himself twelve hundred years before. 
And so might I have sung of Earraid. 

And all the while I was aware that this 
K 



T 30 Memories and Portraits 

life of sea-bathing and sun-burning was for me 
but a holiday. In that year cannon were roar- 
ing for days together on French battlefields; 
and I would sit in my isle (I call it mine, 
after the use of lovers) and think upon the 
war, and the loudness of these far-away 
battles, and the pain of the men's wounds, 
and the weariness of their marching. And I 
would think too of that other war which is 
as old as mankind, and is indeed the life 
of man : the unsparing war, the grind- 
ing slavery of competition ; the toil of 
seventy years, dear-bought bread, precarious 
honour, the perils and pitfalls, and the poor 
rewards. It was a long look forward ; the 
future summoned me as with trumpet calls, 
it warned me back as with a voice of weeping 
and beseeching; and I thrilled and trembled 
on the brink of life, like a childish bather 
on the beach. 

There was another young man on Earraid 
in these days, and we were much together, 
bathing, clambering on the boulders, trying to 
sail a boat and spinning round instead in the 



Memoirs of an Islet 1 3 1 

oily whirlpools of the roost. But the most part 
of the time we spoke of the great uncharted 
desert of our futures ; wondering together 
what should there befall us ; hearing with 
surprise the sound of our own voices in the 
empty vestibule of youth. As far, and as 
hard, as it seemed then to look forward to 
the grave, so far it seems now to look back- 
ward upon these emotions; so hard to recall 
justly that loath submission, as of the sacrificial 
bull, with which we stooped our necks under 
the yoke of destiny. I met my old companion 
but the other day ; I cannot tell of course 
what he was thinking ; but, upon my part, I 
was wondering to see us both so much at 
home, and so composed and sedentary in the 
world ; and how much we had gained, and 
how much we had lost, to attain to that 
composure ; and which had been upon the 
whole our best estate : when we sat there 
prating sensibly like men of some experience, 
or when we shared our timorous and hopeful 
counsels in a western islet. 



IX 

THOMAS STEVENSON 

CIVIL ENGINEER 

nPHE death of Thomas Stevenson will 
mean not very much to the general 
reader. His service to mankind took on 
forms of which the public knows little and 
understands less. He came seldom to 
London, and then only as a task, remaining 
always a stranger and a convinced pro- 
vincial ; putting up for years at the' same 
hotel where his father had gone before him ; 
faithful for long to the same restaurant, the 
same church, and the same theatre, chosen 
simply for propinquity ; steadfastly refusing 
to dine out. He had a circle of his own, 
indeed, at home ; few men were more be- 



Thomas Stevenson 133 

loved in Edinburgh, where he breathed an 
air that pleased him ; and wherever he went, 
in raihvay carriages or hotel smoking-rooms, 
his strange, humorous vein of talk, and his 
transparent honesty, raised him up friends 
and admirers. But to the general public 
and the world of London, except about the 
parliamentary committee-rooms, he remained 
unknown. All the time, his lights were in 
every part of the world, guiding the mariner ; 
his firm were consulting engineers to the 
Indian, the New Zealand, and the Japanese 
Lighthouse Boards, so that Edinburgh was 
a world centre for that branch of applied 
science ; in Germany, he had been called 
" the Nestor of lighthouse illumination ; " 
even in France, where his claims were long 
denied, he was at last, on the occasion of the 
late Exposition, recognised and medalled. 
And to show by one instance the inverted 
nature of his reputation, comparatively small 
at home, yet filling the world, a friend of 
mine was this winter on a visit to the 
Spanish main, and was asked by a Peruvian 



134 Memories and Portraits 

if he " knew Mr. Stevenson the author, be- 
cause his works were much esteemed in 
Peru?" My friend supposed the reference 
was to the writer of tales ; but the Peruvian 
had never heard of Dr. Jekyll ; what he 
had in his eye, what was esteemed in Peru, 
were the volumes of the engineer. 

Thomas Stevenson was born at Edinburgh 
in the year 1 8 1 8, the grandson of Thomas 
Smith, first engineer to the Board of Northern 
Lights, son of Robert Stevenson, brother of 
Alan and David ; so that his nephew, David 
Alan Stevenson, joined with him at the time 
of his death in the engineership, is the sixth 
of the family who has held, successively or 
conjointly, that office. The Bell Rock, his 
father's great triumph, was finished before he 
was born ; but he served under his brother 
Alan in the building of Skerryvore, the 
noblest of all extant deep-sea lights ; and, 
in conjunction with his brother David, he 
added two — the Chickens and Dhu Heartach 
— to that small number of man's extreme 
outposts in the ocean. Of shore lights, the 



Thomas Stevejtson 1 3 5 

two brothers last named erected no fewer 
than twenty-seven ; of beacons/ about twenty- 
five. Many harbours were successfully carried 
out : one, the harbour of Wick, the chief 
disaster of my father's life, was a failure ; 
the sea proved too strong for man's arts ; 
and after expedients hitherto unthought of, 
and on a scale hyper-cyclopean, the work 
must be deserted, and now stands a ruin 
in that bleak, God-forsaken bay, ten miles 
from John-o'-Groat's. In the improvement 
of rivers the brothers were likewise in a 
large way of practice over both England and 
Scotland, nor had any British engineer any- 
thing approaching their experience. 

It was about this nucleus of his pro- 
fessional labours that all my father's scientific 
inquiries and inventions centred ; these pro- 
ceeded from, and acted back upon, his daily 
business. Thus it was as a harbour engineer 
that he became interested in the propagation 

1 In Dr. Murray's admirable new dictionary, I have 
remarked a flaw sub voce Beacon. In its express, technical 
sense, a beacon may be defined as "a founded, artificial 
sea-mark, not lighted." 



136 Memories and Portraits 

and reduction of waves ; a difficult subject 
in regard to which he has left behind him 
much suggestive matter and some valuable 
approximate results. Storms were his sworn 
adversaries, and it was through the study of 
storms that he approached that of meteor- 
ology at large. Many who knew him not 
otherwise, knew — perhaps have in their 
gardens — his louvre - boarded screen for 
instruments. But the great achievement of 
his life was, of course, in optics as applied to 
lighthouse illumination. Fresnel had done 
much ; Fresnel had settled the fixed light 
apparatus on a principle that still seems 
unimprovable ; and when Thomas Stevenson 
stepped in and brought to a comparable 
perfection the revolving light, a not un- 
natural jealousy and much painful con- 
troversy rose in France. It had its hour ; 
and, as I have told already, even in France 
it has blown by. Had it not, it would have 
mattered the less, since all through his life 
my father continued to justify his claim by 
fresh advances. New apparatus for lights in 



Thomas Stevenson 137 

new situations was continually being designed 
with the same unwearied search after per- 
fection, the same nice ingenuity of means ; 
and though the holophotal revolving light 
perhaps still remains his most elegant con- 
trivance, it is difficult to give it the palm 
over the much later condensing system, 
with its thousand possible modifications. The 
number and the value of these improvements 
entitle their author to the name of one of 
mankind's benefactors. In all parts of the 
world a safer landfall awaits the mariner. 
Two things must be said : and, first, that 
Thomas Stevenson was no mathematician. 
Natural shrewdness, a sentiment of optical 
laws, and a great intensity of consideration 
led him to just conclusions ; but to calculate 
the necessary formulae for the instruments he 
had conceived was often beyond him, and he 
must fall back on the help of others, notably 
on that of his cousin and lifelong intimate 
friend, emeritus Professor Swan, of St. 
Andrews, and his later friend, Professor P. 
G. Tait. It is a curious enough circum- 



1 3 8 Memories and Portraits 

stance, and a great encouragement to others, 
that a man so ill equipped should have 
succeeded in one of the most abstract and 
arduous walks of applied science. The 
second remark is one that applies to the 
whole family, and only particularly to Thomas 
Stevenson from the great number and im- 
portance of his inventions : holding as the 
Stevensons did a Government appointment, 
they regarded their original work as some- 
thing due already to the nation, and none of 
them has ever taken out a patent. It is 
another cause of the comparative obscurity 
of the name : for a patent not only brings in 
money, it infallibly spreads reputation ; and 
my father's instruments enter anonymously 
into a hundred light-rooms, and are passed 
anonymously over in a hundred reports, 
where the least considerable patent would 
stand out and tell its author's story. 

But the life-work of Thomas Stevenson 
remains ; what we have lost, what we now 
rather try to recall, is the friend and com- 
panion. He was a man of a somewhat 



Thomas Stevenson 139 

antique strain : with a blended sternness and 
softness that was wholly Scottish and at first 
somewhat bewildering ; with a profound 
essential melancholy of disposition and (what 
often accompanies it) the most humorous 
geniality in company ; shrewd and childish ; 
passionately attached, passionately preju- 
diced ; a man of many extremes, many 
faults of temper, and no very stable foothold 
for himself among life's troubles. Yet he 
was a wise adviser ; many men, and these 
not inconsiderable, took counsel with him 
habitually. " I sat at his feet," writes one 
of these, " when I asked his advice, and when 
the broad brow was set in thought and the 
firm mouth said his say, I always knew that 
no man could add to the worth of the con- 
clusion." He had excellent taste, though 
whimsical and partial ; collected old furni- 
ture and delighted specially in sunflowers 
long before the days of Mr. Wilde ; took a 
lasting pleasure in prints and pictures ; was 
a devout admirer of Thomson of Dudding- 
ston at a time when few shared the taste ; 



1 40 Memories and Portraits 

and though he read Httle, was constant to 
his favourite books. He had never any- 
Greek ; Latin he happily re-taught himself 
after he had left school, where he was a mere 
consistent idler : happily, I say, for Lactan- 
tius, Vossius, and Cardinal Bona were his 
chief authors. The first he must have read 
for twenty years uninterruptedly, keeping it 
near him in his study, and carrying it in his 
bag on journeys. Another old theologian, 
Brown of Wamphray, was often in his 
hands. When he was indisposed, he had 
two books, Guy Mannering and The 
Parents Assistant^ of which he never 
wearied. He was a strong Conservative, or, 
as he preferred to call himself, a Tory ; ex- 
cept in so far as his views were modified by 
a hot-headed chivalrous sentiment for women. 
He was actually in favour of a marriage law 
under which any woman might have a 
divorce for the asking, and no man on any 
ground whatever ; and the same sentiment 
found another expression in a Magdalen 
Mission in Edinburgh, founded and largely 



Thomas Stevenson 141 

supported by himself. This was but one of 
the many channels of his public generosity ; 
his private was equally unstrained. The 
Church of Scotland, of which he held the 
doctrines (though in a sense of his own) and 
to which he bore a clansman's loyalty, profited 
often by his time and money ; and though, 
from a morbid sense of his own unworthi- 
ness, he would never consent to be an office- 
bearer, his advice was often sought, and he 
served the Church on many committees. 
What he perhaps valued highest in his work 
were his contributions to the defence of 
Christianity ; one of which, in particular, was 
praised by Hutchinson Stirling and reprinted 
at the request of Professor Crawford. 

His sense of his own unworthiness I have 
called morbid ; morbid, too, were his sense 
of the fleetingness of life and his concern 
for death. He had never accepted the con- 
ditions of man's life or his own character ; 
and his inmost thoughts were ever tinged 
with the Celtic melancholy. Cases of con- 
science were sometimes grievous to him, and 



142- Memories and Portraits 

that delicate employment of a scientific wit- 
ness cost him many qualms. But he found 
respite from these troublesome humours in 
his work, in his lifelong study of natural 
science, in the society of those he loved, and 
in his daily walks, which now would carry 
him far into the country with some congenial 
friend, and now keep him dangling about 
the town from one old book-shop to another, 
and scraping romantic acquaintance with 
every dog that passed. His talk, com- 
pounded of so much sterling sense and so 
much freakish humour, and clothed in lan- 
guage so apt, droll, and emphatic, was a per- 
petual delight to all who knew him before 
the clouds began to settle on his mind. His 
use of language was both just and pictur- 
esque ; and when at the beginning of his ill- 
ness he began to feel the ebbing of this power, 
it was strange and painful to hear him reject 
one word after another as inadequate, and 
at length desist from the search and leave 
his phrase unfinished rather than finish it 
without propriety. It was perhaps another 



Thomas Steveiison 143 

Celtic trait that his affections and emotions, 
passionate as these were, and Hable to pas- 
sionate ups and downs, found the most elo- 
quent expression both in words and gestures. 
Love, anger, and indignation shone through 
him and broke forth in imagery, like what 
we read of Southern races. For all these 
emotional extremes, and in spite of the 
melancholy ground of his character, he had 
upon the whole a happy life ; nor was he 
less fortunate in his death, which at the last 
came to him unaware. 



X 

TALK AND TALKERS 

Sir, we had a good talk.— Johnson. 
As we must account for every idle word, so we must for 
every idle silence. — Franklin. 

I 

'T^HERE can be no fairer ambition than to 
excel in talk ; to be affable, gay, ready, 
clear and welcome ; to have a fact, a thought, 
or an illustration, pat to every subject ; and 
not only to cheer the flight of time among 
our intimates, but bear our part in that great 
international congress, always sitting, where 
public wrongs are first declared, public erorrs 
first corrected, and the course of public 
opinion shaped, day by day, a little nearer 
to the right. No measure comes before 



Talk a7id Talkers 145 

Parliament but it has been long ago prepared 
by the grand jury of the talkers ; no 
book is written that has not been largely 
composed by their assistance. Literature in 
many of its branches is no other than the 
shadow of good talk ; but the imitation falls 
far short of the original in life, freedom and 
effect. There are always two to a talk, 
giving and taking, comparing experience and 
according conclusions. Talk is fluid, tenta- 
tive, continually " in further search and 
progress ;" while written words remain fixed, 
become idols even to the writer, found 
wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of 
obvious error in the amber of the truth. 
Last and chief, while literature, gagged with 
linsey-woolsey, can only deal with a fraction 
of the life of man, talk goes fancy free and 
may call a spade a spade. Talk has none 
of the freezing immunities of the pulpit. It 
cannot, even if it would, become merely 
aesthetic or merely classical like literature. 
A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dis- 
solved in laughter, and speech runs forth 



146 Memories and Portraits 

out of the contemporary groove into the 
open fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like 
schoolboys but of school. And it is in talk 
alone that we can learn our period and our- 
selves. In short, the first duty of a man is 
to speak ; that is his chief business in this 
world ; and talk, which is the harmonious 
speech of two or more, is by far the most 
accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in, 
money; it is all profit ; it completes our 
education, founds and fosters our friendships, 
and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost 
any state of health. 

The spice of life is battle ; the friendliest 
relations are still a kind of contest; and if we 
would not forego all that is valuable in our lot, 
vve must continually face some other person, 
eye to eye, and wrestle a fall whether in love 
or enmity. It is still by force of body, or 
power of character or intellect, that we attain 
to worthy pleasures. Men and women con- 
tend for each other in the lists of love, like 
rival mesmerists ; the active and adroit decide 
their challenges in the sports of the body ; 



Talk and Talkers 147 

and the sedentary sit down to chess or con- 
versation. All sluggish and pacific pleasures 
are, to the same degree, solitary and selfish ; 
and every durable bond between human 
beings is founded in or heightened by some 
element of competition. Now, the relation 
that has the least root in matter is un- 
doubtedly that airy one of friendship ; and 
hence, I suppose, it is that good talk most 
commonly arises among friends. Talk is, 
indeed, both the scene and instrument of 
friendship. It is in talk alone that the 
friends can measure strength, and enjoy that 
amicable counter- assertion of personality 
which is the gauge of relations and the sport 
of life. 

A good talk is not to be had for the ask- 
ing. Humours must first be accorded in a 
kind of overture or prologue ; hour, company 
and circumstance be suited ; and then, at a 
fit juncture, the subject, the quarry of two 
heated minds, spring up like a deer out of 
the wood. Not that the talker has any of 
the hunter's pride, though he has all and 



148 Memories and Portraits 

more than all his ardour. The genuine 
artist follows the stream of conversation as 
an angler follows the windings of a brook, 
not dallying where he fails to " kill." He 
trusts implicitly to hazard ; and he is 
rewarded by continual variety, continual 
pleasure, and those changing prospects of 
the truth that are the best of education. 
There is nothing in a subject, so called, 
that we should regard it as an idol, or 
follow it beyond the promptings of desire. 
Indeed, there are few subjects; and so far 
as they are truly talkable, more than the 
half of them may be reduced to three : 
that I am I, that you are you, and that 
there are other people dimly understood 
to be not quite the same as either. Where- 
ever talk may range, it still runs half the 
time on these eternal lines. The theme 
being set, each plays on himself as on an in- 
strument ; asserts and justifies himself; ran- 
sacks his brain for instances and opinions, 
and brings them forth new-minted, to his own 
surprise and the admiration of his adversary. 



Talk and Talkers 149 

All natural talk is a festival of ostentation ; 
and by the laws of the game each accepts 
and fans the vanity of the other. It is from 
that reason that we venture to lay ourselves so 
open, that we dare to be so warmly eloquent, 
and that we swell in each other's eyes to 
such a vast proportion. For talkers, once 
launched, begin to overflow the limits of 
their ordinary selves, tower up to the height 
of their secret pretensions, and give themselves 
out for the heroes, brave, pious, musical and 
wise, that in their most shining moments they 
aspire to be. So they weave for themselves 
with words and for a while inhabit a palace 
of delights, temple at once and theatre, where 
they fill the round of the world's dignities, 
and feast with the gods, exulting in Kudos. 
And when the talk is over, each goes his 
way, still flushed with vanity and admiration, 
still trailing clouds of glory ; each declines 
from the height of his ideal orgie, not in a 
moment, but by slow declension. I remem- 
ber, in the entr'acte of an afternoon perform- 
ance, coming forth into the sunshine, in a 



1 5 o Memories and Portraits 

beautiful green, gardened corner of a romantic 
city ; and as I sat and smoked, the music 
moving in my blood, I seemed to sit there 
and evaporate The Flying Dutchman (for it 
was that I had been hearing) with a wonder- 
ful sense of life, warmth, well-being and 
pride ; and the noises of the city, voices, 
bells and marching feet, fell together in my 
ears like a symphonious orchestra. In the 
same way, the excitement of a good talk 
lives for a long while after in the blood, the 
heart still hot within you, the brain still 
simmering, and the physical earth swimming 
around you with the colours of the sunset. 

Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn 
up a large surface of life, rather than dig 
mines into geological strata. Masses of 
experience, anecdote, incident, cross-lights, 
quotation, historical instances, the whole 
flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in 
and in upon the matter in hand from every 
point of the compass, and from every degree 
of mental elevation and abasement — these 
are the material with which talk is fortified, 



Talk and Talkers 151 

the food on which the talkers thrive. Such 
argument as is proper to tlie exercise should 
still be brief and seizing. Talk should pro- 
ceed by instances ; by the apposite, not the 
expository. It should keep close along the 
lines of humanity, near the bosoms and 
businesses of men, at the level where history, 
fiction and experience intersect and illuminate 
each other. I am I, and You are You, 
with all my heart ; but conceive how 
these lean propositions change and brighten 
when, instead of words, the actual you 
and I sit cheek by jowl, the spirit housed 
in the live body, and the very clothes utter- 
ing voices to corroborate the story in the 
face. Not less surprising is the change when 
we leave off to speak of generalitfes — the 
bad, the good, the miser, and all the 
characters of Theophrastus — and call up 
other men, by anecdote or instance, in their 
very trick and feature ; or trading on a 
common knowledge, toss each other famous 
names, still glowing with the hues of life. 
Communication is no longer by words, but 



1 5 2 Memories and Portraits 

by the instancing of whole biographies, epics, 
systems of philosophy, and epochs of history, 
in bulk. That which is understood excels 
that which is spoken in quantity and quality 
alike ; ideas thus figured and personified, 
change hands, as we may say, like coin ; and 
the speakers imply without effort the most 
obscure and intricate thoughts. Strangers 
who have a large common ground of reading 
will, for this reason, come the sooner to the 
grapple of genuine converse. If they know 
Othello and Napoleon, Consuelo and Clarissa 
Harlowe, Vautrin and Steenie Steenson, they 
can leave generalities and begin at once to 
speak by figures. 

Conduct and art are the two subjects that 
arise most frequently and that embrace the 
widest range of facts. A few pleasures bear 
discussion for their own sake, but only those 
which are most social or most radically 
human ; and even these can only be dis- 
cussed among their devotees. A technicality 
is always welcome to the expert, whether in 
athletics, art or law ; I have heard the best 



Talk and Talkers 153 

kind of talk on technicalities from such rare 
and happy persons as both know and love 
their business. No human being ever spoke 
of scenery for above two minutes at a time, 
which makes me suspect we hear too much 
of it in literature. The weather is regarded 
as the very nadir and scoff of conversational 
topics. And yet the weather, the dramatic 
element in scenery, is far more tractable in 
language, and far more human both in im- 
port and suggestion than the stable features 
of the landscape. Sailors and shepherds, 
and the people generally of coast and 
mountain, talk well of it; and it is often excit- 
ingly presented in literature. But the ten- 
dency of all living talk draws it back and 
back into the common focus of humanity. 
Talk is a creature of the street and market- 
place, feeding on gossip ; and its last resort 
is still in a discussion on morals. That is 
the heroic form of gossip ; heroic in virtue of 
its high pretensions ; but still gossip, because 
it turns on personalities. You can keep no 
men long, nor Scotchmen at all, off moral or 



1 5 4 Memories and Porh^aits 

theological discussion. These are to all the 
world what law is to lawyers ; they are every- 
body's technicalities ; the medium through 
which all consider life, and the dialect in 
which they express their judgments. I 
knew three young men who walked together 
daily for some two months in a solemn and 
beautiful forest and in cloudless summer 
weather ; daily they talked with unabated 
zest, and yet scarce wandered that whole time 
beyond two subjects — theology and love. 
And perhaps neither a court of love nor an 
assembly of divines would have granted their 
premisses or welcomed their conclusions. 

Conclusions, indeed, are not often reached 
by talk any more than by private thinking. 
That is not the profit. The profit is in the 
exercise, and above all in the experience ; 
for when we reason at large on any subject, 
we review our state and history in life. 
From time to time, however, and specially, 
I think, in talking art, talk becomes effective, 
conquering like war, widening the bound- 
aries of knowledge like an exploration. A 



Talk and Talkers 1 5 5 

point arises ; the question takes a problem- 
atical, a baffling, yet a likely air ; the talkers 
begin to feel lively presentiments of some 
conclusion near at hand ; towards this they 
strive with emulous ardour, each by his own 
path, and struggling for first utterance ; and 
then one leaps upon the summit of that 
matter with a shout, and almost at the same 
moment the other is beside him ; and behold 
they are agreed. Like enough, the progress is 
illusory, a mere cat's cradle having been wound 
and unwound out of words. But the sense 
of joint discovery is none the less giddy and 
inspiriting. And in the life of the talker 
such triumphs, though imaginary, are neither 
few nor far apart ; they are attained with 
speed and pleasure, in the hour of mirth ; 
and by the nature of the process, they are 
always worthily shared. 

There is a certain attitude, combative 
at once and deferential, eager to fight 
yet most averse to quarrel, which marks 
out at once the talkable man. It is not 
eloquence, not fairness, not obstinacy, but a 



1 5 6 Me7no7des and Portraits 

certain proportion of all of these that I love 
to encounter in my amicable adversaries. 
They must not be pontiffs holding doctrine, 
but huntsmen questing after elements of 
truth. Neither must they be boys to be 
instructed, but fellow-teachers with whom I 
may wrangle and agree on equal terms. We 
must reach some solution, some shadow of 
consent ; for without that, eager talk becomes 
a torture. But we do not wish to reach it 
cheaply, or quickly, or without the tussle and 
effort wherein pleasure lies. 

The very best talker, with me, is one 
whom I shall call Spring-Heel'd Jack. I 
say so, because I never knew any one who 
mingled so largely the possible ingredients 
of converse. In the Spanish proverb, the 
fourth man necessary to compound a salad, 
is a madman to mix it : Jack is that mad- 
man. I know not which is more remark- 
able ; the insane lucidity of his conclusions, 
the humorous eloquence of his language, or 
his power of method, bringing the whole 
of life into the focus of the subject treated. 



Talk and Talkers 1 5 7 

mixing the conversational salad like a 
drunken god. He doubles like the serpent, 
changes and flashes like the shaken kaleido- 
scope, transmigrates bodily into the views 
of others, and so, in the twinkling of an 
eye and with a heady rapture, turns ques- 
tions inside out and flings them empty 
before you on the ground, like a triumphant 
conjuror. It is my common practice when 
a piece of conduct puzzles me, to attack it 
in the presence of Jack with such grossness, 
such partiality and such wearing iteration, 
as at length shall spur him up in its defence. 
In a moment he transmigrates, dons the 
required character, and with moonstruck 
philosophy justifies the act in question. I 
can fancy nothing to compare with the vim 
of these impersonations, the strange scale 
of language, flying from Shakespeare to Kant, 
and from Kant to Major Dyngwell — 

" As fast as a musician scatters sounds 
Out of an instrument — " 

the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the 
absurd irrelevant particularities, the wit, 



158 Memories and Portraits 

wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence and bathos, 
each startling in its kind, and yet all lumin- 
ous in the admired disorder of their com- 
bination. A talker of a different calibre, 
though belonging to the same school, is 
Burly. Burly is a man of a great presence ; 
he commands a larger atmosphere, gives the 
impression of a grosser mass of character 
than most men. It has been said of him 
that his presence could be felt in a room 
you entered blindfold ; and the same, I 
think, has been said of other powerful con- 
stitutions condemned to much physical in- 
action. There is something boisterous and 
piratic in Burly's manner of talk which suits 
well enough with this impression. He will 
roar you down, he will bury his face in his 
hands, he will undergo passions of revolt 
and agony ; and meanwhile his attitude of 
mind is really both conciliatory and recep- 
tive ; and after Pistol has been out-Pistol'd, 
and the welkin rung for hours, you begin to 
perceive a certain subsidence in these spring 
torrents, points of agreement issue, and you 



Talk and Talkers 1 5 9 

end arm-in-arm, and in a glow of mutual 
admiration. The outcry only serves to 
make your final union the more unexpected 
and precious. Throughout there has been 
perfect sincerity, perfect intelligence, a desire 
to hear although not always to listen, and 
an unaffected eagerness to meet concessions. 
You have, with Burly, none of the dangers 
that attend debate with Spring- Heel'd Jack ; 
who may at any moment turn his powers of 
transmigration on yourself, create for you a 
view you never held, and then furiously fall 
on you for holding it. These, at least, are 
my two favourites, and both are loud, 
copious, intolerant talkers. This argues that 
I myself am in the same category ; for if 
we love talking at all, we love a bright, 
fierce adversary, who will hold his ground, 
foot by foot, in much our own manner, sell 
his attention dearly, and give us our full 
measure of the dust and exertion of battle. 
Both these men can be beat from a position, 
but it takes six hours to do it ; a high and 
hard adventure, worth attempting. With 



1 60 Memories and Portraits 

both you can pass days in an enchanted 
country of the mind, with people, scenery 
and manners of its own ; Hve a Hfe apart, 
more arduous, active and glowing than any 
real existence ; and come forth again when 
the talk is over, as out of a theatre or a 
dream, to find the east wind still blowing 
and the chimney-pots of the old battered city 
still around you. Jack has the far finer mind, 
Burly the far more honest ; Jack gives us 
the animated poetry, Burly the romantic 
prose, of similar themes ; the one glances, 
high like a meteor and makes a light in 
darkness ; the other, with many changing 
hues of fire, burns at the sea-level, like a 
conflagration ; but both have the same 
humour and artistic interests, the same un- 
quenched ardour in pursuit, the same gusts 
of talk and thunderclaps of contradiction. 

Cockshot ^ is a different article, but 

vastly entertaining, and has been meat and 

drink to me for many a long evening. His 

manner is dry, brisk and pertinacious, 

^ The late Fleeming Jenkin. 



Talk and Talkers 1 6 1 

and the choice of words not much. The 
point about him is his extraordinary readi- 
ness and spirit. You can propound nothing 
but he has either a theory about it ready- 
made, or will have one instantly on the 
stocks, and proceed to lay its timbers and 
launch it in your presence. " Let me see," 
he will say. " Give me a moment. I should 
have some theory for that." A blither spec- 
tacle than the vigour with which he sets 
about the task, it were hard to fancy. He is 
possessed by a demoniac energy, welding the 
elements for his life, and bending ideas, as 
an athlete bends a horseshoe, with a visible 
and lively effort. He has, in theorising, a 
compass, an art ; what I would call the 
synthetic gusto ; something of a Herbert 
Spencer, who should see the fun of the 
thing. You are not bound, and no more is 
he, to place your faith in these brand-new 
opinions. But some of them are right 
enough, durable even for life ; and the 
poorest serve for a cock-shy — as when idle 

people, after picnics, float a bottle on a pond 

M 



1 62 Memories and Portraits 

and have an hour's diversion ere it sinks. 
Whichever they are, serious opinions or 
humours of the moment, he still defends his 
ventures with indefatigable wit and spirit, 
hitting savagely himself, but taking punish- 
ment like a man. He knows and never 
forgets that people talk, first of all, for the 
sake of talking ; conducts himself in the 
ring, to use the old slang, like a thorough 
" glutton," and honestly enjoys a telling 
facer from his adversary. Cockshot is 
bottled effervescency, the sworn foe of sleep. 
Three-in-the-morning Cockshot, says a victim. 
His talk is like the driest of all imaginable 
dry champagnes. Sleight of hand and 
inimitable quickness are the qualities by 
which he lives. Athelred, on the other 
hand, presents you with the spectacle of a 
sincere and somewhat slow nature thinking 
aloud. He is the most unready man I ever 
knew to shine in conversation. You may 
see him sometimes wrestle with a refractory 
jest for a minute or two together, and per- 
haps fail to throw it in the end. And 



Talk and Talkers 163 

there is something singularly engaging, often 
instructive, in the simplicity with which he 
thus exposes the process as well as the 
result, the works as well as the dial of the 
clock. Withal he has his hours of inspira- 
tion. Apt words come to him as if by 
accident, and, coming from deeper down, 
they smack the more personally, they have 
the more of fine old crusted humanity, rich 
in sediment and humour. There are sayings 
of his in which he has stamped himself into 
the very grain of the language ; you would 
think he must have worn the words next 
his skin and slept with them. Yet it is not 
as a sayer of particular good things that 
Athelred is most to be regarded, rather as 
the stalwart woodman of thought. I have 
pulled on a light cord often enough, while 
he has been wielding <he broad-axe ; and 
between us, on this unequal division, many 
a specious fallacy has fallen. I have known 
him to battle the same question night after 
night for years, keeping it in the reign of 
talk, constantly applying it and re-applying 



1 64 Me7nories and Portraits 

it to life with humorous or grave intention, 
and all the while, never hurrying, nor flag- 
ging, nor taking an unfair advantage of the 
facts. Jack at a given moment, when aris- 
ing, as it were, from the tripod, can be more 
radiantly just to those from whom he differs ; 
but then the tenor of his thoughts is even 
calumnious ; while Athelred, slower to forge 
excuses, is yet slower to condemn, and sits 
over the welter of the world, vacillating but 
still judicial, and still faithfully contending 
with his doubts. 

Both the last talkers deal much in points 
of conduct and religion studied in the " dry 
light " of prose. Indirectly and as if against 
his will the same elements from time to time 
appear in the troubled and poetic talk of 
Opalstein. His various and exotic know- 
ledge, complete although unready sympathies, 
and fine, full, discriminative flow of language, 
fit him out to be the best of talkers ; so 
perhaps he is with some, not quite with me 
— proxirne accessit, I should say. He sings 
the praises of the earth and the arts, flowers 



Talk and Talkers 165 

and jewels, wine and music, in a moonlight, 
serenading manner, as to the light guitar ; 
even wisdom comes from his tongue like 
singing ; no one is, indeed, more tuneful in 
the upper notes. But even while he sings 
the song of the Sirens, he still hearkens to 
the barking of the Sphinx. Jarring Byronic 
notes interrupt the flow of his Horatian 
humours. His mirth has something of the 
tragedy of the world for its perpetual back- 
ground ; and he feasts like Don Giovanni to 
a double orchestra, one lightly sounding for 
the dance, one pealing Beethoven in the 
distance. He is not truly reconciled either 
with life or with himself; and this instant 
war in his members sometimes divides the 
man's attention. He does not always, per- 
haps not often, frankly surrender himself in 
conversation. He brings into the talk other 
thoughts than those which he expresses ; you 
are conscious that he keeps an eye on some- 
thing else, that he does not shake off the 
world, nor quite forget himself Hence arise 
occasional disappointments ; even an occa- 



1 66 Memories and Portraits 

sional unfairness for his companions, who 
find themselves one day giving too much, 
and the next, when they are wary out of 
season, giving perhaps too Httle. Purcel is 
in another class from any I have mentioned. 
He is no debater, but appears in conversa- 
tion, as occasion rises, in two distinct charac- 
ters, one of which I admire and fear, and 
the other love. In the first, he 15 radiantly 
civil and rather silent, sits on a high, courtly 
hilltop, and from that vantage-ground drops 
you his remarks like favours. He seems 
not to share in our sublunary contentions ; 
he wears no sign of interest ; when on a 
sudden there falls in a crystal of wit, so 
polished that the dull do not perceive it, 
but so right that the sensitive are silenced. 
True talk should have more body and blood, 
should be louder, vainer and more declara- 
tory of the man ; the true talker should 
not hold so steady an advantage over 
whom he speaks with ; and that is one 
reason out of a score why I prefer my 
Purcel in his second character, when he 



Talk and Talkers 167 

unbends into a strain of graceful gossip, 
singing like the fireside kettle. In these 
moods he has an elegant homeliness that 
rings of the true Queen Anne. I know 
another person who attains, in his moments, 
to the insolence of a Restoration comedy, 
speaking, I declare, as Congreve wrote ; but 
that is a sport of nature, and scarce falls 
under the rubric, for there is none, alas ! to 
give him answer. 

One last remark occurs : It is the mark 
of genuine conversation that the sayings can 
scarce be quoted with their full effect beyond 
the circle of common friends. To have their 
proper weight they should appear in a 
biography, and with the portrait of the 
speaker. Good talk is dramatic ; it is like 
an impromptu piece of acting where each 
should represent himself to the greatest ad- 
vantage ; and that is the best kind of talk 
where each speaker is most fully and candidly 
himself, and where, if you were to shift the 
speeches round from one to another, there 
would be the greatest loss in significance 



1 6 8 Memories and Portraits 

and perspicuity. It is for this reason that 
talk depends so wholly on our company. 
We should like to introduce Falstaff and 
Mercutio, or FalstafF and Sir Toby ; but 
Falstaff in talk with Cordelia seems even 
painful. Most of us, by the Protean quality 
of man, can talk to some degree with all ; 
but the true talk, that strikes out all the 
slumbering best of us, comes only with the 
peculiar brethren of our spirits, is founded as 
deep as love in the constitution of our being, 
and is a thing to relish with all our energy, 
while yet we have it, and to be grateful for 
for ever. 



XI 

TALK AND TALKERS^ 

II 

TN the last paper there was perhaps too 
much about mere debate ; and there 
was nothing said at all about that kind of 
talk which is merely lumirtous and restful, 
a higher power of silence, the quiet of the 
evening shared by ruminating friends. There 
is something, aside from personal preference, 
to be alleged in support of this omission. 
Those who are no chimney-cornerers, who 
rejoice in the social thunderstorm, have a 
ground in reason for their choice. They get 
little rest indeed ; but restfulness is a quality 

1 This sequel was called forth by an excellent article in 
The Speciator. 



1 70 Me7nories and Portraits 

for cattle ; the virtues are all active, life is 
alert, and it is in repose that men prepare 
themselves for evil. On the other hand, 
they are bruised into a knowledge of them- 
selves and others ; they have in a high 
degree the fencer's pleasure in dexterity 
displayed and proved ; what they get they 
get upon life's terms, paying for it as they 
go ; and once the talk is launched, they are 
assured of honest dealing from an adversary 
eager like themselves. The aboriginal man 
within us, the cave-dweller, still lusty as 
when he fought tooth and nail for roots 
and berries, scents this kind of equal battle 
from afar ; it is like his old primaeval days 
upon the crags, a return to the sincerity of 
savage life from the comfortable fictions of 
the civilised. And if it be delightful to the 
Old Man, it is none the less profitable to his 
younger brother, the conscientious gentle- 
man. I feel never quite sure of your urbane 
and smiling coteries ; I fear they indulge 
a man's vanities in silence, suffer him to 
encroach, encourage him on to be an ass, and 



Talk and Talker's 171 

send him forth again, not merely contemned 
for the moment, but radically more con- 
temptible than when he entered. But if 
I have a flushed, blustering fellow for my 
opposite, bent on carrying a point, my 
vanity is sure to have its ears rubbed, once 
at least, in the course of the debate. He 
will not spare me when we differ ; he will 
not fear to demonstrate my folly to my face. 
For many natures there is not much 
charm in the still, chambered society, the 
circle of bland countenances, the digestive 
silence, the admired remark, the flutter of 
affectionate approval. They demand more 
atmosphere and exercise ; " a gale upon their 
spirits," as our pious ancestors would phrase 
it ; to have their wits well breathed in an 
uproarious Valhalla. And I suspect that 
the choice, given their character and faults, 
is one to be defended. The purely wise 
are silenced by facts ; they talk in a clear 
atmosphere, problems lying around them 
like a view in nature ; if they can be shown 
to be somewhat in the wrong, they digest 



1/2 Memories and Portraits 

the reproof like a thrashing, and make better 
intellectual blood. They stand corrected by 
a whisper ; a word or a glance reminds them 
of the great eternal law. But it is not so 
with all. Others in conversation seek rather 
contact with their fellow-men than increase 
of knowledge or clarity of thought. The) 
drama, not the philosophy, of life is the\ 
sphere of their intellectual activity. Even 
when they pursue truth, they desire as much 
as possible of what we may call human 
scenery along the road they follow. They 
dwell in the heart of life ; the blood sound- 
ing in their ears, their eyes laying hold of 
what delights them with a brutal avidity 
that makes them blind to all besides, their 
interest riveted on people, living, loving, 
talking, tangible people. To a man of this 
description, the sphere of argument seems 
very pale and ghostly. By a strong ex- 
pression, a perturbed countenance, floods of 
tears, an insult which his conscience obliges 
him to swallow, he is brought round to 
knowledge which no syllogism would have 



Talk and Talkers 1 7 3 

conveyed to him. His own experience is 
so vivid, he is so superlatively conscious of 
himself, that if, day after day, he is allowed 
to hector and hear nothing but approving 
echoes, he will lose his hold on the soberness 
of things and take himself in earnest for a 
god. Talk might be to such an one the 
very way of moral ruin ; the school where 
he might learn to be at once intolerable and 
ridiculous. 

This character is perhaps commoner 
than philosophers suppose. And for per- 
sons of that stamp to learn much by 
conversation, they must speak with their 
superiors, not in intellect, for that is a 
superiority that must be proved, but in 
station. If they cannot find a friend to 
bully them for their good, they must find 
either an old man, a woman, or some one 
so far below them in the artificial order of 
society, that courtesy may be particularly 
exercised. 

The best teachers are the aged. To the 
old our mouths are always partly closed ; 



1 74 Memories and Portraits 

we must swallow our obvious retorts and 
listen. They sit above our heads, on life's 
raised dais, and appeal at once to our respect 
and pity. A flavour of the old school, a 
touch of something different in their manner 
— which is freer and rounder, if they come 
of what is called a good family, and often 
more timid and precise if they are of the 
middle class — serves, in these days, to ac- 
centuate the difference of age and add a 
distinction to gray hairs. But their superi- 
ority is founded more deeply than by out- 
ward marks or gestures. They are before 
us in the march of man ; they have more or 
less solved the irking problem ; they have 
battled through the equinox of life ; in good 
and evil they have held their course ; and 
now, without open shame, they near the 
crown and harbour. It may be we have 
been struck with one of fortune's darts ; we 
can scarce be civil, so cruelly is our spirit 
tossed. Yet long before we were so much 
as thought upon, the like calamity befell the 
old man or woman that now, with pleasant 



Talk and Talkers 1 7 5 

ftumour, rallies us upon our inattention, sit- 
ting composed in the holy evening of man's 
life, in the clear shining after rain. We 
grow ashamed of our distresses, new and hot 
and coarse, like villainous roadside brandy; 
we see life in aerial perspective, under the 
heavens of faith ; and out of the worst, in 
the mere pre^crjce of contented elders, look 
forward and take patience. Fear shrinks 
before them ** like a thing reproved," not 
the flitting a/id ineffectual fear of death, but 
the instant, dwelling terror of the responsi- 
bilities and revenges of life. Their speech, 
indeed, is timid ; they report lions in the 
path ; they counsel a meticulous footing ; 
but their serene, marred faces are more 
eloquent and tell another story. Where 
they have gone, we will go also, not very 
greatly fearing ; what they have endured 
unbroken, we also, God helping us, will 
make a shift fo bear. 

Not only is the presence of the aged in it- 
self remedial, but their minds are stored with 
antidotes, wisdom's simples, plain considera- 



1 76 Memories and Portraits 

tlons overlooked by youth. They have matter 
to communicate, be they never so stupid. Their 
talk is not merely literature, it is great litera- 
ture ; classic in virtue of the speaker's detach- 
ment, studded, like a book of travel, with 
things we should not otherwise have learnt. 
In virtue, I have said, of the speaker's detach- 
ment, — and this is why, of two old men, the 
one who is not your father speaks to you 
with the more sensible authority; for in the 
paternal relation the oldest have lively in- 
terests and remain still young. Thus I have 
known two young men great friends ; each 
swore by the other's father ; the father of 
each swore by the other lad ; and yet each 
pair of parent and child were perpetually by 
the ears. This is typical : it reads like the 
germ of some kindly comedy. 

The old appear in conversation in two 
characters : the critically silent and the gar- 
rulous anecdotic. The last is perhaps what 
we look for ; it is perhaps the more instruc- 
tive. An old gentleman, well on in years, 
sits handsomely and naturally in the bow- 



Talk and Talkers 177 

window of his age, scanning experience with 
reverted eye ; and chirping and smiling, com- 
municates the accidents and reads the lesson 
of his long career. Opinions are strengthened, 
indeed, but they are also weeded out in the 
course of years. What remains steadily pre- 
sent to the eye of the retired veteran in his 
hermitage, what still ministers to his content, 
what still quickens his old honest heart — 
these are " the real long-lived things " that 
Whitman tells us to prefer. Where youth 
agrees with age, not where they differ, wisdom 
lies ; and it is when the young disciple finds 
his heart to beat in tune with his gray-bearded 
teacher's that a lesson may be learned. I 
have known one old gentleman, whom I may 
name, for he is now gathered to his stock — 
Robert Hunter, Sheriff of Dumbarton, and 
author of an excellent law-book still re-edited 
and republished. Whether he was originally 
big or little is more than I can guess. When 
I knew him he was all fallen away and fallen 
in; crooked and shrunken; buckled into a 

stiff waistcoat for support ; troubled by ail- 

N 



1 7 8 Memories and Portraits 

ments, which kept him hobbling in and out 
of the room ; one foot gouty ; a wig for 
decency, not for deception, on his head ; close 
shaved, except under his chin — and for that 
he never failed to apologise, for it went sore 
against the traditions of his life. You can 
imagine how he would fare in a novel by Miss 
Mather ; yet this rag of a Chelsea veteran 
lived to his last year in the plenitude of all 
that is best in man, brimming with human 
kindness, and staunch as a Roman soldier 
under his manifold infirmities. You could 
not say that he had lost his memory, for he 
would repeat Shakespeare and Webster and 
Jeremy Taylor and Burke by the page 
together ; but the parchment was filled up, 
there was no room for fresh inscriptions, and 
he was capable of repeating the same anec- 
dote on many successive visits. His voice 
survived in its full power, and he took a pride 
in using it. On his last voyage as Commis- 
sioner of Lighthouses, he hailed a ship at 
sea and made himself clearly audible without 
a speaking trumpet, ruffling the while with a 



Talk and Talkers 1 79 

proper vanity in his achievement. He had a 
habit of eking out his words with interro- 
gative hems, which was puzzling and a Httle 
wearisome, suited ill with his appearance, and 
seemed a survival from some former stage of 
bodily portliness. Of yore, when he was a 
great pedestrian and no enemy to good claret, 
he may have pointed with these minute guns 
his allocutions to the bench. His humour 
was perfectly equable, set beyond the reach 
of fate ; gout, rheumatism, stone and gravel 
might have combined their forces against 
that frail tabernacle, but when I came round 
on Sunday evening, he would lay aside 
Jeremy Taylor's Life of Christ and greet me 
with the same open brow, the same kind 
formality of manner. His opinions and sym- 
pathies dated the man almost to a decade. 
He had begun life, under his mother's in- 
fluence, as an admirer of Junius, but on 
maturer knowledge had transferred his ad- 
miration to Burke. He cautioned me, with 
entire gravity, to be punctilious in writing 
English ; never to forget that I was a Scotch- 



i8o Memories and Portraits 

man, that English was a foreign tongue, and 
that if I attempted the colloquial, I should 
certainly be shamed : the remark was appo- 
site, I suppose, in the days of David Hume. 
Scott was too new for him ; he had known 
the author — known him, too, for a Tory ; 
and to the genuine classic a contemporary is 
always something of a trouble. He had the 
old, serious love of the play; had even, ^s he 
was proud to tell, played a certain part in the 
history of Shakespearian revivals, for he had 
successfully pressed on Murray, of the old 
Edinburgh Theatre, the idea of producing 
Shakespeare's fairy pieces with great scenic 
display. A moderate in religion, he was 
much struck in the last years of his life by a 
conversation with two young lads, revivalists. 
" H'm," he would say — " new to me. I have 
had — h'm — no such experience." It struck 
him, not with pain, rather with a solemn 
philosophic interest, that he, a Christian as 
he hoped, and a Christian of so old a stand- 
ing, should hear these young fellows talking 
of his own subject, his own weapons that he 



Talk and Talkers 1 8 1 

had fought the battle of life with, — " and — 
h'm — not understand." In this wise and 
graceful attitude he did justice to himself and 
others, reposed unshaken in his old beliefs, 
and recognised their limits without anger or 
alarm. His last recorded remark, on the last 
night of his life, was after he had been arguing 
against Calvinism with his minister and was 
interrupted by an intolerable pang. " After 
all," he said, " of all the 'isms, I know none 
so bad as rheumatism." My own last sight 
of him was some time before, when we dined 
together at an inn ; he had been on circuit 
for he stuck to his duties like a chief part of 
his existence; and I remember it as the only 
occasion on which he ever soiled his lips with 
slang — a thing he loathed. We were both 
Roberts; and as we took our places at table, 
he addressed me with a twinkle : " We are 
just what you would call two bob." He 
offered me port, I remember, as the proper 
milk of youth ; spoke of " twenty-shilling 
notes;" and throughout the meal was full of 
old-world pleasantry and quaintness, like an 



1 8 2 Memories and Portraits 

ancient boy on a holiday. But what I recall 
chiefly was his confession that he had never 
read Othello to an end. Shakespeare was 
his continual study. He loved nothing better 
than to display his knowledge and memory 
by adducing parallel passages from Shake- 
speare, passages where the same word was 
employed, or the same idea differently treated. 
But Othello had beaten him. " That noble 
gentleman and that noble lady — h'm — too 
painful for me." The same night the hoard- 
ings were covered with posters, " Burlesque 
of Othello',' and the contrast blazed up in my 
mind like a bonfire. An unforgettable look 
it gave me into that kind man's soul. His 
acquaintance was indeed a liberal and pious 
education. All the humanities were taught 
in that bare dining-room beside his gouty 
footstool. He w^as a piece of good advice ; 
he was himself the instance that pointed and 
adorned his various talk. Nor could a young 
man have found elsewhere a place so set 
apart from envy, fear, discontent, or any of 
the passions that debase ; a life so honest 



Talk and Talkers 183 

and composed ; a soul like an ancient violin, 
so subdued to harmony, responding to a 
touch in music — as in that dining-room, 
with Mr. Hunter chatting at the eleventh 
hour, under the shadow of eternity, fearless 
and gentle. 

The second class of old people are not 
anecdotic ; they are rather hearers than talk- 
ers, listening to the young with an amused 
and critical attention. To have this sort of 
intercourse to perfection, I think we must go 
to old ladies. Women are better hearers 
than men, to begin with ; they learn, I fear 
in anguish, to bear with the tedious and in- 
fantile vanity of the other sex ; and we will 
take more from a woman than even from 
the oldest man in the way of biting com- 
ment. Biting comment is the chief part, 
whether for profit or amusement, in this 
business. The old lady that I have in my 
eye is a very caustic speaker, her tongue, 
after years of practice, in absolute command, 
whether for silence or attack. If she chance 
to dislike you, you will be tempted to curse 



1 84 Memories and Portraits 

the malignity of age. . But if you chance to 
please even slightly, you will be listened to 
with a particular laughing grace of sympathy, 
and from time to time chastised, as if in 
play, with a parasol as heavy as a pole-axe. 
It requires a singular art, as well as the 
vantage-ground of age, to deal these stun- 
ning corrections among the coxcombs of the 
young. The pill is disguised in sugar of 
wit ; it is administered as a compliment — if 
you had not pleased, you would not have 
been censured ; it is a personal affair — a 
hyphen, a trait d'luiion, between you and 
your censor ; age's philandering, for her 
pleasure and your good. Incontestably the 
young man feels very much of a fool ; but 
he must be a perfect Malvolio, sick with 
self-love, if he cannot take an open buffet 
and still smile. The correction of silence is 
what kills ; when you know you have trans- 
gressed, and your friend says nothing and 
avoids your eye. If a man were made of 
gutta-percha, his heart would quail at such 
a moment. But when the word is out, the 



Talk and Talkers 1 8 5 

worst is over ; and a fellow with any good- 
humour at all may pass through a perfect 
hail of witty criticism, every bare place on 
his soul hit to the quick with a shrewd mis- 
sile, and reappear, as if after a dive, tingling 
with a fine moral reaction, and ready, with 
a shrinking readiness, one-third loath, for a 
repetition of the discipline. 

There are few women, not well sunned 
and ripened, and perhaps toughened, who 
can thus stand apart from a man and say 
the true thing with a kind of genial cruelty. 
Still there are some — and I doubt if there 
be any man who can return the compliment. 
The class of man represented by Vernon 
Whitford in The Egoist says, indeed, the true 
thing, but he says it stockishly. Vernon is 
a noble fellow, and makes, by the way, a 
noble and instructive contrast to Daniel 
Deronda ; his conduct is the conduct of a 
man of honour ; but we agree with him, 
against our consciences, when he remorsefully 
considers " its astonishing dryness." He is 
the best of men, but the best of women 



1 86 Memories and Portraits 

manag-e to combine all that and something 
more. Their very faults assist them ; they 
are helped even by the falseness of their 
position in life. They can retire into the 
fortified camp of the proprieties. They can 
touch a subject and suppress it. The most 
adroit employ a somewhat elaborate reserve as 
a means to be frank, much as they wear gloves 
when they shake hands. But a man has the 
full responsibility of his freedom, cannot evade 
a question, can scarce be silent without rude- 
ness, must answer for his words upon the mo- 
ment, and is not seldom left face to face with 
a damning choice, between the more or less 
dishonourable wriggling of Deronda and 
the downright woodenness of Vernon Whit- 
ford. 

But the superiority of women is per- 
petually menaced ; they do not sit throned 
on infirmities like the old ; they are suitors 
as well as sovereigns ; their vanity is en- 
gaged, their affections are too apt to follow ; 
and hence much of the talk between the sexes 
degenerates into something unworthy of the 



Talk a7td Talkers 187 

name. The desire to please, to shine with a 
certain softness of lustre and to draw a fas- 
cinating picture of oneself, banishes from 
conversation all that is sterling and most of 
what is humorous. As soon as a strong 
current of mutual admiration begins to flow, 
the human interest triumphs entirely over 
the intellectual, and the commerce of words, 
consciously or not, becomes secondary to the 
commercing of eyes. But even where 
this ridiculous danger is avoided, and a 
man and woman converse equally and hon- 
estly, something in their nature or their 
education falsifies the strain. An instinct 
prompts them to agree ; and where that is 
impossible, to agree to differ. Should they 
neglect the warning, at the first suspicion of 
an argument, they find themselves in differ- 
ent hemispheres. About any point of busi- 
ness or conduct, any actual affair demanding 
settlement, a woman will speak and listen, 
hear and answer arguments, not only with 
natural wisdom, but with candour and logical 
honesty. But if the subject of debate be 



1 8 8 Memories and Portraits 

something in the air, an abstraction, an ex- 
cuse for talk, a logical Aunt Sally, then may 
the male debater instantly abandon hope ; he 
may employ reason, adduce facts, be supple, 
be smiling, be angry, all shall avail him 
nothing ; what the woman said first, that 
(unless she has forgotten it) she will repeat 
at the end. Hence, at the very junctures 
when a talk between men grows brighter 
and quicker and begins to promise to bear 
fruit, talk between the sexes is menaced with 
dissolution. The point of difference, the 
point of interest, is evaded by the brilliant 
woman, under a shower of irrelevant conver- 
sational rockets ; it is bridged by the discreet 
woman with a rustle of silk, as she passes 
smoothly forward to the nearest point of 
safety. And this sort of prestidigitation, 
juggling the dangerous topic out of sight 
until it can be reintroduced with safety in 
an altered shape, is a piece of tactics among 
the true drawing-room queens. 

The drawing-room is, indeed, an artificial 
place ; it is so by our choice and for our 



Talk and Talkers 189 

sins. The subjection of women ; the ideal 
imposed upon them from the cradle, and 
worn, like a hair-shirt, with so much con- 
stancy ; their motherly, superior tenderness 
to man's vanity and self-importance ; their 
managing arts — the arts of a civilised slave 
among good-natured barbarians — are all pain- 
ful ingredients and all help to falsify relations. 
It is not till we get clear of that amusing 
artificial scene that genuine relations are 
founded, or ideas honestly compared. In 
the garden, on the road or the hillside, or 
tete -a- tete and apart from interruptions, 
occasions arise when we may learn much 
from any single woman ; and nowhere more 
often than in married life. Marriage is 
one long conversation, chequered by dis- 
putes. The disputes are valueless ; they 
but ingrain the difference ; the heroic heart 
of woman prompting her at once to nail her 
colours to the mast. But in the intervals, 
almost unconsciously and with no desire to 
shine, the whole material of life is turned 
over and over, ideas are struck out and 



1 90 Memories and Portraits 

shared, the two persons more and more 
adapt their notions one to suit the other, 
and in process of time, without sound of 
trumpet, they conduct each other into new 
worlds of thought. 



XII 

THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 

nPHE civilisation, the manners, and the 
morals of dog-kind are to a great ex- 
tent subordinated to those of his ancestral 
master, man. This animal, in many ways 
so superior, has accepted a position of inferi- 
ority, shares the domestic life, and humours 
the caprices of the tyrant. But the potentate, 
like the British in India, pays small regard 
to the character of his willing client, judges 
him with listless glances, and condemns him 
in a byword. Listless have been the looks 
of his admirers, who have exhausted idle 
terms of praise, and buried the poor soul 
below exaggerations. And yet more idle 
and, if possible, more unintelligent has been 



192 Memories and Portraits 

the attitude of his express detractors ; those 
who are very fond of dogs " but in their 
proper place " ; who say " poo' fellow, poo' 
fellow," and are themselves far poorer ; who 
whet the knife of the vivisectionist or heat 
his oven ; who are not ashamed to admire 
" the creature's instinct " ; and flying far 
beyond folly, have dared to resuscitate the 
theory of animal machines. The " dog's in- 
stinct" and the " automaton-dog," in this age 
of psychology and science, sound like strange 
anachronisms. An automaton he certainly 
is ; a machine working independently of his 
control, the heart like the mill-wheel, keeping 
all in motion, and the consciousness, like a 
person shut in the mill garret, enjoying the 
view out of the window and shaken by the 
thunder of the stones ; an automaton in one 
corner of which a living spirit is confined : 
an automaton like man. Instinct again he 
certainly possesses. Inherited aptitudes are 
his, inherited frailties. Some things he at 
once views and understands, as though he 
were awakened from a sleep, as though he 



The Character of Dogs 1 9 3 

came " trailing clouds of glory." But with 
him, as with man, the field of instinct is 
limited ; its utterances are obscure and occa- 
sional ; and about the far larger part of life 
both the dog and his master must conduct 
their steps by deduction and observation. 

The leading distinction between dog and 
man, after and perhaps before the different 
duration gf their lives, is that the one can 
speak and that the other cannot. The absence 
of the power of speech confines the dog in 
the development of his intellect. It hinders 
him from many speculations, for words are 
the beginning of metaphysic. At the same 
blow it saves him from many superstitions, 
and his silence has won for him a higher 
name for virtue than his conduct justifies. 
The faults of the dog are many. He is 
vainer than man, singularly greedy of notice, 
singularly intolerant of ridicule, suspicious 
like the deaf, jealous to the degree of frenzy, 
and radically devoid of truth. The day of 
an intelligent small dog is passed in the 

manufacture and the laborious communica- 
O 



1 94 Memories and Portraits 

tion of falsehood ; he Hes with his tail, he 
lies with his eye, he lies with his protesting 
paw ; and when he rattles his dish or 
scratches at the door his purpose is other 
than appears. But he has some apology to 
offer for the vice: Many of the signs which 
form his dialect have come to bear an 
arbitrary meaning, clearly understood both 
by his master and himself; yet when a new 
want arises he must either invent a new 
vehicle of meaning or wrest an old one to 
a different purpose ; and this necessity fre- 
quently recurring must tend to lessen his 
idea of the sanctity of symbols. Meanwhile 
the dog is clear in his own conscience, and 
draws, with a human nicety, the distinction 
between formal and essential truth. Of his 
punning perversions, his legitimate dexterity 
with symbols, he is even vain ; but when he 
has told and been detected in a lie, there is 
not a hair upon his body but confesses guilt. 
To a dog of gentlemanly feeling theft and 
falsehood are disgraceful vices. The canine, 
like the human, gentleman demands in his 



TJie Character of Dogs 1 9 5 

misdemeanours Montaigne's "7^ ne sais qiiol 
de genereuxr He is never more than half 
ashamed of having barked or bitten ; and 
for those faults into which he has been led 
by the desire to shine before a lady of his 
race, he retains, even under physical correc- 
tion, a share of pride. But to be caught 
lying, if he understands it, instantly uncurls 
his fleece. 

Just as among dull observers he preserves 
a name for truth, the dog has been credited 
with modesty. It is amazing how the use of 
language blunts the faculties of man — that 
because vainglory finds no vent in words, 
creatures supplied with eyes have been 
unable to detect a fault so gross and obvi- 
ous. If a small spoiled dog were suddenly 
to be endowed with speech, he would prate 
interminably, and still about himself; when 
we had friends, we should be forced to lock 
him in a garret ; and what with his whining 
jealousies and his foible for falsehood, in a 
year's time he would have gone far to weary 
out our love. I was about to compare him 



196 Memories and Portraits 

to Sir Willoughby Patterne, but the Patternes 
have a manlier sense of their own merits ; 
and the parallel, besides, is ready. Hans 
Christian Andersen, as we behold him in his 
startling memoirs, thrilling from top to toe 
with an excruciating vanity, and scouting 
even along the street for shadows of offence 
— here was the talking dog. 

It is just this rage for consideration that 
has betrayed the dog into his satellite posi- 
tion as the friend of man. The cat, an 
animal of franker appetites, preserves his 
independence. But the dog, with one eye 
ever on the audience, has been wheedled into 
slavery, and praised and patted into the 
renunciation of his nature. Once he ceased 
hunting and became man's plate-licker, the 
Rubicon was crossed. Thenceforth he was 
a gentleman of leisure ; and except the few 
whom we keep working, the whole race grew 
more and more self-conscious, mannered and 
affected. The number of things that a small 
dog does naturally is strangely small. En- 
joying better spirits and not crushed under 



The Character of Dogs 197 

material cares, he is far more theatrical than 
average man. His whole life, if he be a dog 
of any pretension to gallantry, is spent in a 
vain show, and in the hot pursuit of admira- 
tion. Take out your puppy for a walk, and 
you will find the little ball of fur clumsy, 
stupid, bewildered, but natural. Let but a 
few months pass, and when you repeat the 
process you will find nature buried in con- 
vention. He will do nothing plainly ; but 
the simplest processes of our material life 
will all be bent into the forms of an elaborate 
and mysterious etiquette. Instinct, says the 
fool, has awakened. But it is not so. Some 
dogs — some, at the very least — if they be 
kept separate from others, remain quite 
natural ; and these, when at length they 
meet with a companion of experience, and 
have the game explained to them, distinguish 
themselves by the severity of their devotion 
to its rules. I wish I were allowed to tell a 
story which would radiantly illuminate the 
point ; but men, like dogs, have an elaborate 
and mysterious etiquette. It is their bond 



198 Memories and Portraits 

of sympathy that both are the children of 
convention. 

The person, man or dog, who has a con- 
science is eternally condemned to some 
degree of humbug ; the sense of the law in 
their members fatally precipitates either to- 
wards a frozen and affected bearing. And 
the converse is true ; and in the elaborate 
and conscious manners of the dog, moral 
opinions and the love of the ideal stand con- 
fessed. To follow for ten minutes in the 
street some swaggering, canine cavalier, is to 
receive a lesson in dramatic art and the cul- 
tured conduct of the body ; in every act and 
gesture you see him true to a refined con- 
ception ; and the dullest cur, beholding him, 
pricks up his ear and proceeds to imitate 
and parody that charming ease. For to be 
a high-mannered and high-minded gentle- 
man, careless, affable, and gay, is the inborn 
pretension of the dog. The large dog, so 
much lazier, so much more weighed upon 
with matter, so majestic in repose, so beauti- 
ful in effort, is born with the dramatic means 



The Character of Dogs 199 

to wholly represent the part. And it is 
more pathetic and perhaps more instructive 
to consider the small dog in his conscientious 
and imperfect efforts to outdo Sir Philip 
Sidney. For the ideal of the dog is feudal 
and religious ; the ever-present polytheism, 
the whip-bearing Olympus of mankind, rules 
them on the one hand ; on the other, their 
singular difference of size and strength among 
themselves effectually prevents the appear- 
ance of the democratic notion. Or we might 
more exactly compare their society to the 
curious spectacle presented by a school — 
ushers, monitors, and big and little boys — 
qualified by one circumstance, the introduc- 
tion of the other sex. In each, we should 
observe a somewhat similar tension of man- 
ner, and somewhat similar points of honour. 
In each the larger animal keeps a contempt- 
uous good humour ; in each the smaller 
annoys him with wasp-like impudence, certain 
of practical immunity ; in each we shall 
find a double life producing double charac- 
ters, and an excursive and noisy heroism 



200 Memoi'ies and Port7'aits 

combined with a fair amount ^of practical 
timidity. I have known dogs, and I have 
known school heroes that, set aside the fur, 
could hardly have been told apart ; and if 
we desire to understand the chivalry of old, 
we must turn to the school playfields or the 
dungheap where the dogs are trooping. 

Woman, with the dog, has been long en- 
franchised. Incessant massacre of female 
innocents has changed the proportions of the 
sexes and perverted their relations. Thus, 
when we regard the manners of the dog, we 
see a romantic and monogamous animal, once 
perhaps as delicate as the cat, at war with 
impossible conditions. Man has much to 
answer for ; and the part he plays is yet 
more damnable and parlous than Corin's in 
the eyes of Touchstone. But his intervention 
has at least created an imperial situation for 
the rare surviving ladies. In that society 
they reign withoi^t a rival ; conscious queens ; 
and in the only instance of a canine wife- 
beater that has ever fallen under my notice, 
the criminal was somewhat excused by the 



The Character of Dogs 2 o i 

circumstances of his story. He is a little, 
very alert, well-bred, intelligent Skye, as black 
as \ hat, with a wet bramble for a nose and 
two cairngorms for eyes. To the human 
observer, he is decidedly well-looking ; but 
to the ladies of his race he seems abhorrent. 
A thorough elaborate gentleman, of the 
plume and sword-knot order, he was born 
with a nice sense of gallantry to women. 
He took at their hands the most outrageous 
treatment ; I have heard him bleating like a 
sheep, I have seen him streaming blood, and 
his ear tattered like a regimental banner; 
and yet he would scorn to make reprisals. 
Nay more, when a human lady upraised the 
contumelious whip against the very dame who 
had been so cruelly misusing him, my little 
great-heart gave but one hoarse cry and fell 
upon the tyrant tooth and nail. This is the 
tale of a soul's tragedy. After three years 
of unavailing chivalry, he suddenly, in one 
hour, threw off the yoke of obligation ; had 
he been Shakespeare he would then have 
written Troilus and Cressida to brand the 



202 Alemories and Portraits 

offending sex ; but being only a little dog, 
he began to bite them. The surprise of the 
ladies whom he attacked indicated the mon- 
strosity of his offence ; but he had fairly 
beaten off his better angel, fairly committed 
moral suicide ; for almost in the same hour, 
throwing aside the last rags of decency, he 
proceeded to attack the aged also. The fact 
is worth remark, showing, as it does, that 
ethical laws are common both to dogs and 
men ; and that with both a single deliberate 
violation of the conscience loosens all. "But 
while the lamp holds on to burn," says the 
paraphrase, " the greatest sinner may return." 
I have been cheered to see symptoms of 
effectual penitence in my sweet ruffian ; and 
by the handling that he accepted uncom- 
plainingly the other day from an indignant 
fair one, I begin to hope the period of Stiiiin 
tuid Drang is closed. 

All these little gentlemen are subtle casu- 
ists. The duty to the female dog is plain ; but 
where competing duties rise, down they will 
sit and study them out, like Jesuit confessors. 



The Character of Dogs 203 

I knew another little Skye, somewhat plain 
in manner and appearance, but a creature 
compact of amiability and solid wisdom. 
His family going abroad for a winter, he was 
received for that period by an uncle in the 
same city. The winter over, his own family 
home again, and his own house (of which he 
was very proud) reopened, he found himself 
in a dilemma between two conflicting duties 
of loyalty ar.d gratitude. His old friends 
were not to be neglected, but it seemed 
hardly decent to desert the new. This was 
how he solved the problem. Every morning, 
as soon as the door was opened, off posted 
Coolin to his uncle's, visited the children 
in the nursery, saluted the whole family, and 
was back at home in time for breakfast and 
his bit of fish. Nor was this done without a 
sacrifice on his part, sharply felt ; for he had 
to forego the particular honour and jewel of 
his day — his morning's walk with my father. 
And, perhaps from this cause, he gradually 
wearied of and relaxed the practice, and at 
length returned entirely to his ancient habits. 



204 Memo7'ies and Portraits 

But the same decision served him in another 
and more distressing case of divided duty, 
which happened not long after. He was not 
at all a kitchen dog, but the cook had nursed 
him with unusual kindness during the dis- 
temper ; and though he did not adore her as 
he adored my father — although (born snob) 
he was critically conscious of her position as 
" only a servant " — he still cherished for her 
a special gratitude. Well, the cook left, and 
retired some streets away to lodgings of her 
own ; and there was Coolin in precisely the 
same situation with any young gentleman 
who has had the inestimable benefit of a 
faithful nurse. The canine conscience did 
not solve the problem with a pound of tea at 
Christmas. No longer content to pay a fly- 
ing visit, it was the whole forenoon that he 
dedicated to his solitary friend. And so, 
day by day, he continued to comfort her 
solitude until (for some reason which I could 
never understand and cannot approve) he 
was kept locked up to break him of the 
graceful habit. Here, it is not the similarity, 



The Character of Dogs 205 

it is the difference, that is worthy of remark ; 
the clearly marked degrees of gratitude and 
the proportional duration of his visits. Any- 
thing further removed from instinct it were 
hard to fancy ; and one is even stirred to a 
certain impatience with a character so desti- 
tute of spontaneity, so passionless in justice, 
and so priggishly obedient to the voice of 
reason. 

There are not many dogs like this good 
Coolin, and not many people. But the type 
is one well marked, both in the human and 
the canine family. Gallantry was not his 
aim, but a solid and somewhat oppressive 
respectability. He was a sworn foe to the 
unusual and the conspicuous, a praiser of the 
golden mean, a kind of city uncle modified 
by Cheeryble. And as he was precise and 
conscientious in all the steps of his own 
blameless course, he looked for the same 
precision and an even greater gravity in the 
bearing of his deity, my father. It was no 
sinecure to be Coolin's idol : he was exacting 
like a rigid parent ; and at every sign of 



2o6 Memories and Portraits 

levity in the man whom he respected, he 
announced loudly the death of virtue and 
the proximate fall of the pillars of the 
earth. 

I have called him a snob ; but all dogs are 
so, though in varying degrees. It is hard to 
follow their snobbery among themselves; for 
though I think we can perceive distinctions of 
rank, we cannot grasp what is the criterion. 
Thus in Edinburgh, in a good part of the 
town, there were several distinct societies or 
clubs that met in the morning to — the phrase 
is technical — to " rake the backets " in a 
troop. A friend of mine, the master of 
three dogs, was one day surprised to observe 
that they had left one club and joined 
another ; but whether it was a rise or a fall, 
and the result of an invitation or an ex- 
pulsion, was more than he could guess. 
And this illustrates pointedly our ignorance 
of the real life of dogs, their social ambitions 
and their social hierarchies. At least, in 
their dealings with men they are not only 
conscious of sex, but of the difference of 



The Character of Dogs 207 

station. And that in the most snobbish 
manner ; for the poor man's dog is not 
offended by the notice of the rich, and keeps 
all his ugly feeling for those poorer or more 
ragged than his master. And again, for 
every station they have an ideal of be- 
haviour, to which the master, under pain of 
derogation, will do wisely to conform. How 
often has not a cold glance of an eye in- 
formed me that my dog was disappointed ; 
and how much more gladly would he not 
have taken a beating than to be thus 
wounded in the seat of piety ! 

I knew one disrespectable dog. He was 
far liker a cat ; cared little or nothing for 
men, with whom he merely coexisted as we 
do with cattle, and was entirely devoted to 
the art of poaching. A house would not 
hold him, and to live in a town was what he 
refused. He led, I believe, a life of troubled 
but genuine pleasure, and perished beyond 
all question in a trap. But this was an ex- 
ception, a marked reversion to the ancestral 
type ; like the hairy human infant. The 



20 8 Memories and Portraits 

true dog of the nineteenth century, to judge 
by the remainder of my fairly large acquaint- 
ance, is in love with respectability. A street- 
dog was once adopted by a lady. While still 
an Arab, he had done as Arabs do, gam- 
bolling in the mud, charging into butchers' 
stalls, a cat -hunter, a sturdy beggar, a 
common rogue and vagabond ; but with his 
rise into society he laid aside these incon- 
sistent pleasures. He stole no more, he 
hunted no more cats ; and conscious of his 
collar, he ignored his old companions. Yet 
the canine upper class was never brought to 
recognise the upstart, and from that hour, 
except for human countenance, he was alone. 
Friendless, shorn of his sports and the habits 
of a lifetime, he still lived in a glory of 
happiness, content with his acquired respect- 
ability, and with no care but to support it 
solemnly. Are we to condemn or praise 
this self-made dog ? We praise his human 
brother. And thus to conquer vicious habits 
is as rare with dogs as with men. With the 
more part, for all their scruple -mongering 



The Character of Dogs 209 

and moral thought, the vices that are born 
with them remain invincible throughout ; 
and they live all their years, glorying in 
their virtues, but still the slaves of their 
defects. Thus the sage Coolin was a thief 
to the last ; among a thousand peccadilloes, 
a whole goose and a whole cold leg of 
mutton lay upon his conscience ; but Woggs,^ 
whose soul's shipwreck in the matter of gal- 
lantry I have recounted above, has only twice 
been known to steal, and has often nobly 
conquered the temptation. The eighth is 
his favourite commandment. There is some- 
thing painfully human in these unequal vir- 
tues and mortal frailties of the best. Still 
more painful is the bearing of those "stam- 
mering professors " in the house of sickness 
and under the terror of death. It is beyond a 
doubt to me that, somehow or other, the dog 
connects together, or confounds, the uneasi- 

1 Walter, Watty, Woggy, Woggs, Wogg, and lastly Bogue ; 
under which last name he fell in battle some twelve months 
ago. Glory was his aim and he attained it ; for his icon, by 
the hand of Caldecott, now lies among the treasures of the 
nation. 

P 



2 1 o Memo7nes and Portraits 

ness of sickness and the consciousness of 
guilt. To the pains of the body he often 
adds the tortures of the conscience ; and at 
these times his haggard protestations form, 
in regard to the human deathbed, a dreadful 
parody or parallel. 

I once supposed that I had found an 
inverse relation between the double etiquette 
which dogs obey ; and that those who were 
most addicted to the showy street life among 
other dogs were less careful in the practice 
of home virtues for the tyrant man. But the 
female dog, that mass of carneying affecta- 
tions, shines equally in either sphere ; rules 
her rough posse of attendant swains with 
unwearying tact and gusto ; and with her 
master and mistress pushes the arts of in- 
sinuation to their crowning point. The 
attention of man and the regard of other 
dogs flatter (it would thus appear) the same 
sensibility ; but perhaps, if we could read the 
canine heart, they would be found to flatter 
it in very different degrees. Dogs live with 
man as courtiers round a monarch, steeped in 



The Character of Dogs 2 1 1 

the flattery of his notice and enriched with 
sinecures. To push their favour in this 
world of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, 
the business of their lives ; and their joys 
may lie outside. I am in despair at our 
persistent ignorance. I read in the lives of 
our companions the same processes of reason, 
the same antique and fatal conflicts of the 
right against the wrong, and of unbitted 
nature with too rigid custom ; I see them 
with our weaknesses, vain, false, inconstant 
against appetite, and with our one stalk of 
virtue, devoted to the dream of an ideal ; 
and yet, as they hurry by me on the street 
with tail in air, or come singly to solicit my 
regard, I must own the secret purport of 
their lives is still inscrutable to man. Is 
man the friend, or is he the patron only ? 
Have they indeed forgotten nature's voice ? 
or are those moments snatched from courtier- 
ship when they touch noses with the tinker's 
mongrel, the brief reward and pleasure of 
their artificial lives ? Doubtless, when man 
shares with his dog the toils of a profession 



2 1 2 Memories and Portraits 

and the pleasures of an art, as with the 
shepherd or the poacher, the affection warms 
and strengthens till it fills the soul. But 
doubtless, also, the masters are, in many 
cases, the object of a merely interested 
cultus, sitting aloft like Louis Ouatorze, 
giving and receiving flattery and favour ; 
and the dogs, like the majority of men, have 
but foregone their true existence and become 
the dupes of their ambition. 



XIII 

*'A PENNY PLAIN 
AND TWOPENCE COLOURED" 

'T^HESE words will be familiar to all 
students of Skelt's Juvenile Drama. 
That national monument, after having 
changed its name to Park's, to Webb's, to 
Redington's, and last of all to Pollock's, has 
now become, for the most part, a memory. 
Some of its pillars, like Stonehenge, are still 
afoot, the rest clean vanished. It may be 
the Museum numbers a full set ; and Mr. 
lonides perhaps, or else her gracious Majesty, 
may boast their great collections ; but to 
the plain private person they are become, 
like Raphaels, unattainable. I have, at 
different times, possessed Aladdin, The Red 



2 1 4 Memories and Portraits 

Rover, The Blind Boy, The Old Oak Chest, 
The Wood Dcemon, Jack Sheppard, The 
Miller and his Men, Der FreiscJiiitz, The 
Smuggler, The Forest of Bondy, Robin Hood, 
The Waterman, Richard I., My Poll and my 
Partner Joe, The Inchcape Bell (imperfect), 
and Thi^ee - Fingered Jack, the Tern- or of 
Jamaica ; and I have assisted others in the 
illumination of The Maid of the Inn and 
The Battle of Waterloo. In this roll-call of 
stirring names you read the evidences of a 
happy childhood ; and though not half of 
them are still to be procured of any living 
stationer, in the mind of their once happy 
owner all survive, kaleidoscopes of changing 
pictures, echoes of the past 

There stands, I fancy, to this day (but 
now how fallen !) a certain stationer's shop 
at a corner of the wide thoroughfare that 
joins the city of my childhood with the sea. 
When, upon any Saturday, we made a party 
to behold the ships, we passed that corner ; 
and since in those days I loved a ship as a 
man loves Burgundy or daybreak, this of 



A Penny Plain, 2d. Coloured 215 

itself had been enough to hallow it. But 
there was more than that. In the Leith 
Walk window, all the year round, there 
stood displayed a theatre in working order, 
with a " forest set," a " combat," and a few 
"robbers carousing" in the slides; and below 
and about, dearer tenfold to me ! the plays 
themselves, those budgets of romance, lay 
tumbled one upon another. Long and often 
have I lingered there with empty pockets. 
One figure, we shall say, was visible in the 
first plate of characters, bearded, pistol in 
hand, or drawing to his ear the clothyard 
arrow ; I would spell the name : was it 
Macaire, or Long Tom Coffin, or Grindoff, 
2d dress ? O, how I would long to see 
the rest ! how — if the name by chance were 
hidden — I would wonder in what play he 
figured, and what immortal legend justified 
his attitude and strange apparel ! And then 
to go within, to announce yourself as an 
intending purchaser, and, closely watched, 
be suffered to undo those bundles and 
breathlessly devour those pages of gesticu- 



2 1 6 Memories and Portraits 

lating villains, epileptic combats, bosky 
forests, palaces and war - ships, frowning 
fortresses and prison vaults — it was a giddy- 
joy. That shop, which was dark and smelt 
of Bibles, was a loadstone rock for all that 
bore the name of boy. They could not pass 
it by, nor, having entered, leave it. It was 
a place besieged ; the shopmen, like the 
Jews rebuilding Salem, had a double task. 
They kept us at the stick's end, frowned us 
down, snatched each play out of our hand 
ere we were trusted with another ; and, 
increditable as it may sound, used to de- 
mand of us upon our entrance, like banditti, 
if we came with money or with empty hand. 
Old Mr. Smith himself, worn out with my 
eternal vacillation, once swept the treasures 
from before me, with the cry : " I do not 
believe, child, that you are an intending 
purchaser at all!" These were the dragons 
of the garden ; but for such joys of paradise 
we could have faced the Terror of Jamaica 
himself Every sheet we fingered was an- 
other lightning glance into obscure, delicious 



A Penny Plain, 2d. Colottred 2 1 7 

story ; it was like wallowing in the raw stuff 
of story-books. I know nothing to compare 
with it save now and then in dreams, when 
I am privileged to read in certain unwrit 
stories of adventure, from which I awake 
to find the world all vanity. The crux of 
Buridan's donkey was as nothing to the 
uncertainty of the boy as he handled and 
lingered and doated on these bundles of 
delight ; there was a physical pleasure in 
the sight and touch of them which he would 
jealously prolong ; and when at length the 
deed was done, the play selected, and the 
impatient shopman had brushed the rest 
into the gray portfolio, and the boy was 
forth again, a little late for dinner, the lamps 
springing into light in the blue winter's even, 
and TJie Miller, or The Rover, or some 
kindred drama clutched against his side — 
on what gay feet he ran, and how he laughed 
aloud in exultation ! I can hear that laughter 
still. Out of all the years of my life, I can 
recall but one home-coming to compare with 
these, and that was on the night when I 



2 1 8 Memories and Portraits 

brought back with me the A^^abian Enter- 
tainments in the fat, old, double -columned 
volume with the prints. I was just well 
into the story of the Hunchback, I remember, 
when my clergyman-grandfather (a man we 
counted pretty stiff) came in behind me. I 
grew blind with terror. But instead of 
ordering the book away, he said he envied 
me. Ah, well he might ! 

The purchase and the first half-hour at 
home, that was the summit. Thenceforth 
the interest declined by little and little. The 
fable, as set forth in the play-book, proved 
to be not worthy of the scenes and charac- 
ters : what fable would not ? Such pas- 
sages as : "Scene 6. The Hermitage. Night 
set scene. Place back of scene i, No. 2, at 
back of stage and hermitage, Fig. 2, out of 
set piece, R. H. in a slanting direction " — 
such passages, I say, though very practical, 
are hardly to be called good reading. In- 
deed, as literature, these dramas did not 
much appeal to me. I forget the very 
outline of the plots. Of The Blind Boy^ 



A Penny Plain, 2d. Coloured 2 1 9 

beyond the fact that he was a most injured 
prince and once, I think, abducted, I know 
nothing. And The Old Oak Chest, what 
was it all about? that proscript (ist dress), 
that prodigious number of banditti, that old 
woman with the broom, and the magnificent 
kitchen in the third act (was it in the third ?) 
— they are all fallen in a deliquium, swim 
faintly in my brain, and mix and vanish. 

I cannot deny that joy attended the 
illumination ; nor can I quite forgive that 
child who, wilfully foregoing pleasure, stoops 
to " twopence coloured." With crimson lake 
(hark to the sound of it — crimson lake ! — 
the horns of elf-land are not richer on the 
ear) — with crimson lake and Prussian blue 
a certain purple is to be compounded which, 
for cloaks especially, Titian could not equal. 
The latter colour with gamboge, a hated 
name although an exquisite pigment, supplied 
a green of such a savoury greenness that to- 
day my heart regrets It. Nor can I recall 
without a tender weakness the very aspect 
of the water where I dipped my brush. Yes, 



2 20 Memories and Portraits 

there was pleasure in the painting. But when 
all was painted, it is needless to deny it, 
all was spoiled. You might, indeed, set up a 
scene or two to look at ; but to cut the figures 
out was simply sacrilege ; nor could any child 
twice court the tedium, the worry, and the 
long-drawn disenchantment of an actual per- 
formance. Two days after the purchase the 
honey had been sucked. Parents used to 
complain ; they thought I wearied of my 
play. It was not so : no more than a 
person can be said to have wearied of 
his dinner when he leaves the bones and 
dishes ; I had got the marrow of it and said 
grace. 

Then was the time to turn to the back of the 
play-book and to study that enticing double 
file of names, where poetry, for the true child 
of Skelt, reigned happy and glorious like 
her Majesty the Queen. Much as I have 
travelled in these realms of gold, I have yet 
seen, upon that map or abstract, names of 
El Dorados that still haunt the ear of 
memory, and are still but names. The Float- 



A Penny Plain, 2d. Coloured 2 2 1 

ing Beacon — why was that denied me ? or 
The Wreck Ashore? Sixteen- String Jack, 
whom I did not even guess to be a highway- 
man, troubled me awake and haunted my 
slumbers ; and there is one sequence of three 
from that enchanted calender that I still at 
times recall, like a loved verse of poetry : 
Lodoiska, Silver Palace, Echo of Westminster 
Bridge. Names, bare names, are surely 
more to children than we poor, grown-up, 
obliterated fools remember. 

The name of Skelt itself has always 
seemed a part and parcel of the charm of 
his productions. It may be different with the 
rose, but the attraction of this paper drama 
sensibly declined when Webb had crept into 
the rubric: a poor cuckoo, flaunting in Skelt's 
nest. And now we have reached Pollock, 
sounding deeper gulfs. Indeed, this name of 
Skelt appears so stagey and piratic, that I 
will adopt it boldly to design these qualities. 
Skeltery, then, is a quality of much art. It 
is even to be found, with reverence be it said, 
among the works of nature. The stagey is • 



2 2 2 Memories and Portraits 

its generic name ; but it is an old, insular, 
home-bred staginess ; not French, domestically 
British ; not of to-day, but smacking of O. 
Smith, Fitzball, and the great age of melo- 
drama: a peculiar fragrance haunting it; utter- 
ing its unimportant message in a tone of voice 
that has the charm of fresh antiquity. I will 
not insist upon the art of Skelt's purveyors. 
These wonderful characters that once so 
thrilled our soul with their bold attitude, 
array of deadly engines and incomparable 
costume, to-day look somewhat pallidly ; the 
extreme hard favour of the heroine strikes 
me, I had almost said with pain ; the villain's 
scowl no longer thrills me like a trumpet ; 
and the scenes themselves, those once un- 
paralleled landscapes, seem the efforts of a 
prentice hand. So much of fault we find ; 
but on the other side the impartial critic 
rejoices to remark the presence of a great 
unity of gusto ; of those direct clap-trap 
appeals, which a man is dead and buriable 
when he fails to answer ; of the footlight 
glamour, the ready-made, bare-faced, transpon- 



A Penny Plain, 2d. Coloured 223 

tine picturesque, a thing not one with cold 
reaHty, but how much dearer to the mind ! 

The scenery of Skeltdom — or, shall we 
say, the kingdom of Transpontus ? — had a 
prevailing character. Whether it set forth 
Poland as in TJie Blind Boy, or Bohemia 
with The Miller and Ids Men, or Italy with 
The Old Oak Chest, still it was Transpontus. 
A botanist could tell it by the plants. The 
hollyhock was all pervasive, running wild in 
deserts ; the dock was common, and the 
bending reed ; and overshadowing these were 
poplar, palm, potato tree, and Qtcercus Skeltica 
— brave growths. The caves were all em- 
bowelled in the Surreyside formation ; the 
soil was all betrodden by the light pump of 
T. P. Cooke. Skelt, to be sure, had yet 
another, an oriental string : he held the 
gorgeous east in fee ; and in the new quarter 
of H3^eres, say, in the garden of the Hotel 
des lies d'Or, you may behold these blessed 
visions realised. But on these I will not 
dwell ; they were an outwork ; it was in the 
occidental scenery that Skelt was all himself. 



2 24 Memories and Portraits 

It had a strong flavour of England ; it was a 
sort of indigestion of England and drop-scenes, 
and I am bound to say was charming. How 
the roads wander, how the castle sits upon 
the hill, how the sun eradiates from behind 
the cloud, and how the congregated clouds 
themselves uproll, as stiff as bolsters ! Here 
is the cottage interior, the usual first flat, with 
the cloak upon the nail, the rosaries of onions, 
the gun and powder-horn and corner-cup- 
board ; here is the inn (this drama must be 
nautical, I foresee Captain Luff and Bold 
Bob Bowsprit) with the red curtain, pipes, 
spittoons, and eight-day clock ; and there 
again is that impressive dungeon with the 
chains, which was so dull to colour. England, 
the hedgerow elms, the thin brick houses, 
windmills, glimpses of the navigable Thames 
— England, when at last I came to visit it, 
was only Skelt made evident : to cross the 
border was, for the Scotsman, to come home 
to Skelt ; there was the inn-sign and there 
the horse-trough, all foreshadowed in the 
faithful Skelt. If, at the ripe age of fourteen 



A Penny Plain, 2d, Coloured 225 

years, I bought a certain cudgel, got a friend 
to load it, and thenceforward walked the 
tame ways of the earth my own ideal, radiat- 
ing pure romance — still I was but a puppet 
in the hand of Skelt ; the original of that 
regretted bludgeon, and surely the antitype 
of all the bludgeon kind, greatly improved 
from Cruikshank, had adorned the hand of 
Jonathan Wild, pi. i. "This is mastering 
me," as Whitman cries, upon some lesser 
provocation. What am I ? what are life, art, 
letters, the world, but what my Skelt has 
made them ? He stamped himself upon my 
immaturity. The world was plain before I 
knew him, a poor penny world ; but soon it 
was all coloured with romance. If I go to the 
theatre to see a good old melodrama, 'tis but 
Skelt a little faded. If I visit a bold scene 
in nature, Skelt would have been bolder ; 
there had been certainly a castle on that 
mountain, and the hollow tree — that set piece 
— I seem to miss it in the foreground. In- 
deed, out of this cut-and-dry, dull, swagger- 
ing, obtrusive and infantile art, I seem to 
Q 



226 Memories and Portraits 

have learned the very spirit of my hfe's 
enjoyment ; met there the shadows of the 
characters I was to read about and love in a 
late future ; got the romance of Der F^-eis- 
chiitz long ere I was to hear of Weber or 
the mighly Formes; acquired a gallery of 
scenes and characters with which, in the 
silent theatre of the brain, I might enact all 
novels and romances ; and took from these 
rude cuts an enduring and transforming 
pleasure. Reader — and yourself? 

A word of moral : it appears that B. Pol- 
lock, late J. Redington, No. 73 Hoxton 
Street, not only publishes twenty-three of 
these old stage favourites, but owns the 
necessary plates and displays a modest readi- 
ness to issue other thirty-three. If you love 
art, folly, or the bright eyes of children, speed 
to Pollock's, or to Clarke's of Garrick Street. 
In Pollock's list of publicanda I perceive a 
pair of my ancient aspirations : Wreck Ashore 
and Sixteen- String Jack ; and I cherish the 
belief that when these shall see once more 
the light of day, B. Pollock will remember 



A Penny Plain, 2d. Coloured 227 

this apologist. But, indeed, I have a dream 
at times that is not all a dream. I seem to 
myself to wander in a ghostly street — E. W., 
I think, the postal district — close below the 
fool's-cap of St. Paul's, and yet within easy 
hearing of the echo of the Abbey bridge. 
There in a dim shop, low in the roof and 
smelling strong of glue and footlights, I find 
myself in quaking treaty with great Skelt him- 
self, the aboriginal, all dusty from the tomb. I 
buy, with what a choking heart — I buy them 
all, all but the pantomimes ; I pay my mental 
money, and go forth ; and lo ! the packets 
are dust. 



XIV 

A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL 
OF DUMAS'S 

T^HE books that we re-read the oftenest are 
not ahvays those that we admire the 
most ; we choose and we revisit them for 
many and various reasons, as we choose and 
revisit human friends. One or two of 
Scott's novels, Shakespeare, MoHere, Mon- 
taigne, TJie Egoist, and the Vicomte de Brage- 
lonne, form the inner circle of my intimates. 
Behind these comes a good troop of dear 
acquaintances ; TJie Pilgrim's Progress in the 
front rank, The Bible in Spain not far behind. 
There are besides a certain number that look 
at me with reproach as I pass them by on 
my shelves : books that I once thumbed and 



A Gossip on a Novel of Dujnas s 229 

studied : houses which were once Hke home 
to me, but where I now rarely visit. I am 
on these sad terms (and blush to confess it) 
with Wordsworth, Horace, Burns and Hazlitt. 
Last of all, there is the class of book that 
has its hour of brilliancy — glows, sings, 
charms, and then fades again into insignifi- 
cance until the fit return. Chief of those 
who thus smile and frown on me by turns, I 
must name Virgil and Herrick, who, were 
they but 

" Their sometime selves the same throughout the year," 

must have stood in the first company with 
the six names of my continual literary 
intimates. To these six, incongruous as 
they seem, I have long been faithful, and 
hope to be faithful to the day of death. I 
have never read the whole of Montaigne, but 
I do not like to be long without reading 
some of him, and my delight in what I do 
read never lessens. Of Shakespeare I have 
read all but Richard III., Henry VI., Titus 
Andronicus, and AlVs Well that Ends Well ; 



2 30 Memories and Portraits 

and these, having already made all suitable 
endeavour, I now know that I shall never 
read — to make up for which unfaithfulness I 
could read much of the rest for ever. Of 
Moliere — surely the next greatest name of 
Christendom — I could tell a very similar 
story ; but in a little corner of a little essay 
these princes are too much out of place, and 
I prefer to pay my fealty and pass on. How 
often I have read Guy Mannering, Rob Roy, 
or Redga?mtlet, I have no means of guessing, 
having begun young. But it is either four 
or five times that I have read l^ie Egoist, 
and either five or six that I have read the 
Vicomte de Bragelonne. 

Some, who would accept the others, may 
wonder that I should have spent so much of 
this brief life of ours over a work so little 
famous as the last. And, indeed, I am sur- 
prised myself; not at my own devotion, but 
the coldness of the world. My acquaintance 
with the Vicomte began, somewhat indirectly, 
in the year of grace 1863, when I had the 
advantage of studying certain illustrated 



A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas'' s 2 3 1 

dessert plates in a hotel at Nice. The name 
of d'Artagnan in the legends I already 
saluted like an old friend, for I had met it 
the year before in a work of Miss Yonge's. 
My first perusal was in one of those pirated 
editions that swarmed at that time out of 
Brussels, and ran to such a troop of neat and 
dwarfish volumes. I understood but little of 
the merits of the book ; my strongest memory 
is of the execution of d'Eymeric and Lyodot 
— a strange testimony to the dulness of a 
boy, who could enjoy the rough-and-tumble 
in the Place de Greve, and forget d'Artagnan's 
visits to the two financiers. My next reading 
was in winter-time, when I lived alone upon 
the Pentlands. I would return in the early 
night from one of my patrols with the shep- 
herd ; a friendly face would meet me in the 
door, a friendly retriever scurry upstairs to 
fetch my slippers ; and I would sit down with 
the Vicointe for a long, silent, solitary lamp- 
light evening by the fire. And yet I know 
not why I call it silent, when it was en- 
livened with such a clatter of horse-shoes, 



232 Memories and Portraits 

and such a rattle of musketry, and such a 
stir of talk ; or why I call those evenings 
solitary in which I gained so many friends. 
I would rise from my book and pull the 
blind aside, and see the snow and the glitter- 
ing hollies chequer a Scotch garden, and the 
winter moonlight brighten the white hills. 
Thence I would turn again to that crowded 
and sunny field of life in which it was so easy 
to forget myself, my cares, and my surround- 
ings : a place busy as a city, bright as a 
theatre, thronged with memorable faces, and 
sounding with delightful speech. I carried 
the thread of that epic into my slumbers, I 
woke with it unbroken, I rejoiced to plunge 
into the book again at breakfast, it w^as with 
a pang that I must lay it down and turn to 
my own labours ; for no part of the world 
has ever seemed to me so charming as these 
pages, and not even my friends are quite so 
real, perhaps quite so dear, as d'Artagnan. 

Since then I have been going to and fro at 
very brief intervals in my favourite book ; and 
I have now just risen from my last (let me 



A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas s 233 

call it my fifth) perusal, having- liked it 
better and admired it more seriously than 
ever. Perhaps I have a sense of ownership, 
being so well known in these six volumes. 
Perhaps I think that d'Artagnan delights to 
have me read of him, and Louis Quatorze is 
gratified, and Fouquet throws me a look, and 
Aramis, although he knows I do not love 
him, yet plays to me with his best graces, as 
to an old patron of the show. Perhaps, if I 
am not careful, something may befall me like 
what befell George IV. about the battle of 
Waterloo, and I may come to fancy the 
Vicomte one of the first, and Heaven knows 
the best, of my own works. At least, I avow 
myself a partisan ; and when I compare the 
popularity of the Vicomte with that of 
Monte CristOy or its own elder brother, the 
Trois MoHsquetaires^ I confess I am both 
pained and puzzled. 

To those who have already made acquaint- 
ance with the titular hero in the pages of 
Vingt Ans Apres, perhaps the name may 
act as a deterrent. A man might well stand 



2 34 Me7fiories and Portraits 

back if he supposed he were to follow, for six 
volumes, so well-conducted, so fine-spoken, 
and withal so dreary a cavalier as Bragelonne. 
But the fear is idle. I may be said to have 
passed the best years of my life in these six 
volumes, and my acquaintance with Raoul 
has never gone beyond a bow ; and when he, 
who has so long pretended to be alive, is at last 
suffered to pretend to be dead, I am some- 
times reminded of a saying in an earlier 
volume : " Eiifin^ dit Miss Stewart^'- — and it 
was of Bragelonne she spoke — " enfin it a 
fait qiLelqttechose : c'est, ma foi ! bien hetireiix" 
I am reminded of it, as I say ; and the next 
moment, when Athos dies of his death, and 
my dear d'Artagnan bursts into his storm of 
sobbing, I can but deplore my flippancy. 

Or perhaps it is La Valliere that the reader 
of Vingt Alls Apr es is inclined to flee. Well, 
he is right there too, though not so right. 
Louise is no success. Her creator has spared 
no pains ; she is well-meant, not ill-designed, 
sometimes has a word that rings out true ; 
sometimes, if only for a breath, she may even 



A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas s 235 

engage our sympathies. But I have never 
envied the King his triumph. And so far 
from pit}^ing Bragelonne for his defeat, I 
could wish him no worse (not for lack of 
malice, but imagination) than to be wedded 
to that lady. Madame enchants me ; I can 
forgive that royal minx her most serious 
offences ; I can thrill and soften with the 
King on that memorable occasion when he 
goes to upbraid and remains to flirt ; and 
when it comes to the " Allans, ahnez-moi doncl' 
it is my heart that melts in the bosom of 
de Guiche. Not so with Louise. Readers 
cannot fail to have remarked" that what an 
author tells us of the beauty or the charm of 
his creatures goes for nought ; that we know 
instantly better ; that the heroine cannot 
open her mouth but what, all in a moment, 
the fine phrases of preparation fall from 
round her like the robes from Cinderella, and 
she stands before us, self-betrayed, as a poor, 
ugly, sickly wench, or perhaps a strapping 
market-woman. Authors, at least, know it 
well ; a heroine will too often start the trick 



236 Memories ajtd Portraits 

of " getting ugly ; " and no disease is more 
difficult to cure. I said authors ; but indeed 
I had a side eye to one author in particular, 
with whose works I am very well acquainted, 
though I cannot read them, and who has 
spent many vigils in this cause, sitting beside 
his ailing puppets and (like a magician) 
wearying his art to restore them to youth 
and beauty. There are others who ride too 
high for these misfortunes. Who doubts the 
loveliness of Rosalind? Arden itself was 
not more lovely. Who ever questioned the 
perennial charm of Rose Jocelyn, Lucy Des- 
borough, or Clara Middleton ? fair women with 
fair names, the daughters of George Meredith. 
Elizabeth Bennet has but to speak, and I am 
at her knees. Ah ! these are the creators 
of desirable women. They would never have 
fallen in the mud with Dumas and poor La 
Valliere. It is my only consolation that not 
one of all of them, except the first, could 
have plucked at the moustache of d'Artagnan. 
Or perhaps, again, a proportion of readers 
stumble at the threshold. In so yast a 



A Gossip on a Novel of Dtmias s 237 

mansion there were sure to be back stairs 
and kitchen offices where no one would 
deh'ght to linger; but it was at least unhappy 
that the vestibule should be so badly lighted ; 
and until, in the seventeenth chapter, 
d'Artagnan sets off to seek his friends, I must 
confess, the book goes heavily enough. But, 
from thenceforward, what a feast is spread! 
Monk kidnapped ; d'Artagnan enriched ; 
Mazarin's death; the ever delectable adven- 
ture of Belle Isle, wherein Aramis outwits 
d'Artagnan, with its epilogue (vol. v. chap, 
xxviii.), where d'Artagnan regains the moral 
superiority; the love adventures at Fontaine- 
bleau, with St. Aignan's story of the dryad 
and the business of de Guiche, de Wardes, 
and Manicamp ; Aramis made general of 
the Jesuits ; Aramis at the bastille ; the 
night talk in the forest of Senart ; Belle Isle 
again, with the death of Porthos ; and last, 
but not least, the taming of d'Artagnan the 
untamable, under the lash of the young 
King. What other novel has such epic 
variety and nobility of incident? often, \{ you 



238 Memories and Portraits 

will, impossible ; often of the order of an 
Arabian story ; and yet all based in human 
nature. For if you come to that, what novel 
has more human nature? not studied with 
the microscope, but seen largely, in plain 
daylight, with the natural eye ? What novel 
has more good sense, and gaiety, and wit, and 
unflagging, admirable literary skill? Good 
souls, I suppose, must sometimes read it in 
the blackguard travesty of a translation. But 
there is no style so untranslatable ; light as 
a whipped trifle, strong as silk ; wordy like 
a village tale ; pat like a general's despatch ; 
with every fault, yet never tedious ; with 
no merit, yet inimitably right. And, once 
more, to make an end of commendations, 
what novel is inspired with a more unstrained 
or a more wholesome morality ? 

Yes ; in spite of Miss Yonge, who intro- 
duced me to the name of d'Artagnan only 
to dissuade me from a nearer knowledge of 
the man, I have to add morality. There is no 
quite good book without a good morality ; but 
the world is wide, and so are morals. Out of 



A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas s 239 

two people who have dipped into Sir Richard 
Burton's TJwusarid and One Nights, one shall 
have been offended by the animal details ; 
another to whom these were harmless, per- 
haps even pleasing, shall yet have been 
shocked in his turn by the rascality and 
cruelty of all the characters. Of two readers, 
again, one shall have been pained by the 
morality of a religious memoir, one by that 
of the Vicomte de Bragelonne. And the 
point is that neither need be wrong. We 
shall always shock each other both in life 
and art ; we cannot get the sun into our 
pictures, nor the abstract right (if there be 
such a thing) into our books ; enough if, in 
the one, there glimmer some hint of the great 
light that blinds us from heaven ; enough, 
if, in the other, there shine, even upon foul 
details, a spirit of magnanimity. I would 
scarce send to the Vicomte a reader who was 
in quest of what we may call puritan morality. 
The ventripotent mulatto, the great eater, 
worker, earner and waster, the man of much 
and witty laughter, the man of the great 



2 40 Memories and Portraits 

heart and alas ! of the doubtful honesty, is 
a figure not yet clearly set before the world; 
he still awaits a sober and yet genial portrait; 
but with whatever art that may be touched, 
and whatever indulgence, it will not be the 
portrait of a precisian. Dumas was certainly 
not thinking of himself, but of Planchet, 
when he put into the mouth of d'Artagnan's 
old servant this excellent profession : " Mon- 
sietir,fetais tme de ccs bonnes pates d'homuies 
que Dieit a fait pour s'aninier pendant un 
certam temps et pour trouver bonnes toutes 
choses qui accornpagnent leur sejour sur la 
terrer He was thinking, as I say, of Plan- 
chet, to whom the words are aptly fitted ; 
but they were fitted also to Planchet's 
creator ; and perhaps this struck him as he 
wrote, for observe what follows: ^^UArtag- 
nan s' ass it alors pres de la fenetre^ et, cette 
p kilos op hie de Planchet lui ay ant paru so tide, 
il y revar In a man who finds all things 
good, you will scarce expect much zeal for 
negative virtues : the active alone will have 
a charm for him ; abstinence, however wise, 



A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas s 241 

however kind, will always seem to such a 
judge entirely mean and partly impious. So 
with Dumas. Chastity is not near his heart ; 
nor yet, to his own sore cost, that virtue of 
frugality which is the armour of the artist. 
Now, in the Viconite^ he had much to do 
with the contest of Fouquet and Colbert. 
Historic justice should be all upon the side 
of Colbert, of official honesty, and fiscal com- 
petence. And Dumas knew it well : three 
times at least he shows his knowledge; once 
it is but flashed upon us and received with 
the laughter of Fouquet himself, in the jest- 
ing controversy in the gardens of Saint 
Mande ; once it is touched on by Aramis in 
the forest of Senart ; in the end, it is set 
before us clearly in one dignified speech of 
the triumphant Colbert. But In Fouquet, the 
waster, the lover of good cheer and wit and 
art, the swift transactor of much business, 
" r/ionime de bniit, I'/ioinuie de plaisir, 
FJiomme qui nest que parceqne les auti^es 
sontl' Dumas saw something of himself and 
drew the figure the more tenderly. It is to 



242 Memories and Portraits 

me even touching to see how he insists on 
Fouquet's honour ; not seeing, you might 
think, that unflawed honour is impossible to 
spendthrifts ; but rather, perhaps, in the hght 
of his own Hfe, seeing it too well, and cling- 
ing the more to what was left. Honour can 
survive a wound ; it can live and thrive with- 
out a member. The man rebounds from his 
disgrace ; he begins fresh foundations on the 
ruins of the old ; and when his sword is 
broken, he will do valiantly with his dagger. 
So it is with Fouquet in the book ; so it was 
with Dumas on the battlefield of life. 

To cling to what is left of any damaged 
quality is virtue in the man ; but perhaps 
to sing its praises is scarcely to be called 
morality in the writer. And it is elsewhere, 
it is in the character of d'Artagnan, that we 
must look for that spirit of morality, which 
is one of the chief merits of the book, makes 
one of the main joys of its perusal, and 
sets it high above more popular rivals. 
Athos, with the coming of years, has de- 
clined too much into the preacher, and 



A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas s 24^ 

the preacher of a sapless creed ; but d'Ar- 
tagnan has mellowed into a man so witty, 
rough, kind and upright, that he takes 
the heart by storm. There is nothing of 
the copy-book about his virtues, nothing of 
the drawing-room in his fine, natural civility ; 
he will sail near the wind ; he is no dis- 
trict visitor — no Wesley or Robespierre ; 
his conscience is void of all refinement 
whether for good or evil ; but the whole man 
rings true like a good sovereign. Readers 
who have approached the VicomtCy not 
across country, but by the legitimate, five- 
volumed avenue of the MoiisqiLetaires and 
Vhigt Alls Apres, will not have forgotten 
d'Artagnan's ungentlemanly and perfectly 
improbable trick upon Milady. What a 
pleasure it is, then, what a reward, and how 
agreeable a lesson, to see the old captain 
humble himself to the son of the man whom 
he had personated ! Here, and through- 
out, if I am to choose virtues for myself or 
my friends, let me choose the virtues of 
d'Artagnan. I do not say there is no 



244 Memories and Portraits 

character as well drawn in Shakespeare ; I 
do say there is none that I love so wholly. 
There are many spiritual eyes that seem to 
spy upon our actions — eyes of the dead and 
the absent, whom we imagine to behold us 
in our most private hours, and whom we fear 
and scruple to offend : our witnesses and 
judges. And among these, even if you 
should think me childish, I must count my 
d'Artagnan — not d'Artagnan of the memoirs 
whom Thackeray pretended to prefer — a 
preference, I take the freedom of saying, in 
which he stands alone ; not the dArtagnan 
of flesh and blood, but him of the ink and 
paper ; not Nature's, but Dumas's. And 
this is the particular crown and triumph of 
the artist — not to be true merely, but to be 
lovable ; not simply to convince, but to 
enchant. 

There is yet another point in the Vicomte 
which I find incomparable. I can recall no 
other work of the imagination in which 
the end of life is represented with so 
nice a tact. I was asked the other day if 



A Gossip on a Novel of Dttmas' s 24$ 

Dumas made me laugh or cry. Well, in 
this my late fifth reading of the VicointCi 
I did laugh once at the small Coquelin de 
Voliere business, and was perhaps a thought 
surprised at having done so : to make up for 
it, I smiled continually. But for tears, I do 
not know. If you put a pistol to my throat, 
I must own the tale trips upon a very airy 
foot — within a measurable distance of un- 
reality; and for those who like the big guns 
to be discharged and the great passions to 
appear authentically, it may even seem in- 
adequate from first to last. Not so to me j 
I cannot count that a poor dinner, or a poor 
book, where I meet with those I love ; and, 
above all, in this last volume, I find a singular 
charm of spirit. It breathes a pleasant and 
a tonic sadness, always brave, never hysteri- 
cal. Upon the crowded, noisy life of this 
long tale, evening gradually falls ; and the 
lights are extinguished, and the heroes pass 
away one by one. One by one they go, and 
not a regret embitters their departure ; the 
young succeed them in their places, Louis 



246 Memories aiid Portraits 

Quatorze is swelling larger and shining 
broader, another generation and another 
France dawn on the horizon ; but for us and 
these old men whom we have loved so long, 
the inevitable end draws near and is wel- 
come. To read this well is to anticipate 
experience. Ah, if only when these hours 
of the long shadows fall for us in reality and 
not in figure, we may hope to face them 
with a mind as quiet ! 

But my paper is running out ; the siege 
guns are firing on the Dutch frontier ; and I 
must say adieu for the fifth time to my old 
comrade fallen on the field of glory. Adieit 
— rather att revoir ! Yet a sixth time, 
dearest d'Artagnan, we shall kidnap Monk 
and take horse together for Belle Isle. 



XV 
A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 

T N anything fit to be called by the name 
of reading, the process itself should be 
absorbing and voluptuous ; we should gloat 
over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, 
and rise from the perusal, our mind filled 
with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of 
images, incapable of sleep or of continuous 
thought. The words, if the book be elo- 
quent, should run thenceforward in our ears 
like the noise of breakers, and the story, if 
it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand 
coloured pictures to the eye. It was for 
this last pleasure that we read so closely, 
and loved our books so dearly, in the bright, 
troubled period of boyhood. Eloquence 



248 Memories and Portraits 

and thought, character and conversation, 
were but obstacles to brush aside as we 
dug blithely after a certain sort of incident, 
like a pig for truffles. For my part, I liked 
a story to begin with an old wayside inn 
where, " towards the close of the year 1 7 — ," 
several gentlemen in three-cocked hats were 
playing bowls. A friend of mine preferred 
the Malabar coast in a storm, with a ship 
beating to windward, and a scowling fellow 
of Herculean proportions striding along the 
beach ; he, to be sure, was a pirate. This 
was further afield than my home-keeping 
fancy loved to travel, and designed alto- 
gether for a larger canvas than the tales 
that I affected. Give me a highwayman 
and I was full to the brim ; a Jacobite would 
do, but the highwayman was my favourite 
dish. I can still hear that merry clatter of 
the hoofs along the moonlit lane ; night and 
the coming of day are still related in my 
mind with the doings of John Rann or 
Jerry Abershaw ; and the words " post- 
chaise," the " great North road," " ostler," 



A Gossip 071 Ro7nance 249 

and " nag " still sound in my ears like 
poetry. One and all, at least, and each with 
his particular fancy, we read story-books in 
childhood, not for eloquence or character or 
thought, but for some quality of the brute 
incident. That quality was not mere blood- 
shed or wonder. Although each of these 
was welcome in its place, the charm for the 
sake of which we read depended on some- 
thing different from either. My elders used 
to read novels aloud ; and I can still re- 
member four different passages which I 
heard, before I was ten, with the same keen 
and lasting pleasure. One I discovered long 
afterwards to be the admirable opening of 
What will he Do zvith It : it was no wonder 
I was pleased with that. The other three 
still remain unidentified. One is a little 
vague ; it was about a dark, tall house at 
night, and people groping on the stairs by 
the light that escaped from the open door of 
a sickroom. In another, a lover left a ball, 
and went walking in a cool, dewy park, 
whence he could watch the lighted windows 



2 50 Memories and Portraits 

and the figures of the dancers as they 
moved. This was the most sentimental 
impression I think I had yet received, for a 
child is somewhat deaf to the sentimental. 
In the last, a poet, who had been tragically 
wrangling with his wife, walked forth on the 
sea-beach on atempestuous nightand witnessed 
the horrors of a wreck.^ Different as they 
are, all these early favourites have a common 
note — they have all a touch of the romantic. 
Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance 
the poetry of circumstance. The pleasure 
that we take in life is of two sorts — the active 
and the passive. Now we are conscious of a 
great command over our destiny; anon we are 
lifted up by circumstance, as by a breaking 
wave, and dashed we know not how into the 
future. Now we are pleased by our con- 
duct, anon merely pleased by our surround- 
ings. It would be hard to say which of 
these modes of satisfaction is the more effec- 
tive, but the latter is surely the more 

1 Since traced by many obliging correspondents to the 
gallery of Charles Kingsley. 



A Gossip on Romance 251 

constant. Conduct is three parts of life, they 
say ; but I think they put it high. There is a 
vast deal in life and letters both which is not 
immoral, but simply a-moral; which either 
does not regard the human will at all, or deals 
with it in obvious and healthy relations ; where 
the interest turns, not upon what a man shall 
choose to do, but on how he manages to do 
it ; not on the passionate slips and hesita- 
tions of the conscience, but on the problems 
of the body and of the practical intelligence, 
in clean, open-air adventure, the shock of 
arms or the diplomacy of life. With such 
material as this it is impossible to build a 
play, for the serious theatre exists solely on 
moral grounds, and is a standing proof of 
the dissemination of the human conscience. 
But it is possible to build, upon this ground, 
the most joyous of verses, and the most 
lively, beautiful, and buoyant tales. 

One thing in life calls for another ; there 
is a fitness in events and places. The sight 
of a pleasant arbour puts it in our mind to 
sit there. One place suggests work, another 



2 52 Meino7nes aiid Portraits 

idleness, a third early rising and long 
rambles in the dew. The effect of night, of 
any flowing water, of lighted cities, of the 
peep of day, of ships, of the open ocean, 
calls up in the mind an army of anonymous 
desires and pleasures. Something, we feel, 
should happen ; we know not what, yet we 
proceed in quest of it. And many of the 
happiest hours of life fleet by us in this vain 
attendance on the genius of the place and 
moment. It is thus that tracts of young 
fir, and low rocks that reach into deep 
soundings, particularly torture and delight 
me. Something must have happened in 
such places, and perhaps ages back, to mem- 
bers of my race ; and when I was a child I 
tried in vain to invent appropriate games for 
them, as I still try, just as vainly, to fit 
them with the proper story. Some places 
speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry 
aloud for a murder ; certain old houses de- 
mand to be haunted ; certain coasts are set 
apart for shipwreck. Other spots again 
seem to abide their destiny, suggestive and 



A Gossip on Romance 253 

impenetrable, " miching mallecho." The inn 
at Biirford Bridge, with its arbours and green 
garden and silent, eddying river — though it 
is known already as the place where Keats 
wrote some of his Endymion and Nelson 
parted from his Emma — still seems to wait 
the coming of the appropriate legend. 
Within these ivied walls, behind these old 
green shutters, some further business 
smoulders, waiting for its hour. The old 
Hawes Inn at the Queen's Ferry makes a simi- 
lar call upon my fancy. There it stands, apart 
from the town, beside the pier, in a climate of 
its own, half inland, half marine — in front, the 
ferry bubbling with the tide and the guard- 
ship swinging to her anchor ; behind, the old 
garden with the trees. Americans seek it 
already for the sake of Lovel and Oldbuck, 
who dined there at the beginning of the 
Antiquary. But you need not tell me — 
that is not all ; there is some story, unre- 
corded or not yet complete, which must 
express the meaning of that inn more fully. 
So it is with names and faces ; so it is with 



2 54 Memories and Portraits 

incidents that are idle and inconclusive in 
themselves, and yet seem like the beginning 
of some quaint romance, which the all- 
careless author leaves untold. How many 
of these romances have we not seen deter- 
mine at their birth ; how many people have 
met us with a look of meaning in their eye, 
and sunk at once into trivial acquaintances ; 
to how many places have we not drawn 
near, with express intimations — " here my 
destiny awaits me" — and we have but dined 
there and passed on ! I have lived both 
at the Hawes and Burford in a perpetual 
flutter, on the heels, as it seemed, of some 
adventure that should justify the place ; but 
though the feeling had me to bed at night 
and called me again at morning in one 
unbroken round of pleasure and suspense, 
nothing befell me in either worth remark. 
The man or the hour had not yet come ; 
but some day, I think, a boat shall put off 
from the Queen's Ferry, fraught with a dear 
cargo, and some frosty night a horseman, 
on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip 



A Gossip on Romance 255 

upon the green shutters of the inn at 
Burford.^ 

Now, this is one of the natural appetites 
with which any lively literature has to count. 
The desire for knowledge, I had almost 
added the desire for meat, is not more 
deeply seated than this demand for fit and 
striking incident. The dullest of clowns 
tells, or tries to tell, himself a story, as the 
febelest of children uses invention in his 
play ; and even as the imaginative grown 
person, joining in the game, at once enriches 
it with many delightful circumstances, the 
great creative writer shows us the realisation 
and the apotheosis of the day-dreams of 
common men. His stories may be nourished 
with the realities of life, but their true mark 
is to satisfy the nameless longings of the 
reader, and to obey the ideal laws of the 
day-dream. The right kind of thing should 
fall out in the right kind of place ; the right 

^ Since the above was written I have tried to launch 
the boat with my own hands in Kidjiapped, Some day, 
perhaps, I may try a rattle at the shutters. 



256 Memories and Portraits 

kind of thing should follow ; and not only 
the characters talk aptly and think naturally, 
but all the circumstances in a tale answer 
one to another like notes in music. The 
threads of a story come from time to time 
together and make a picture in the web ; the 
characters fall from time to time into some 
attitude to each other or to nature, which 
stamps the story home like an illustration. 
Crusoe recoiling from the footprint, Achilles 
shouting over against the Trojans, Ulysses 
bending the great bow. Christian running 
with his fingers in his ears, these are each 
culminating moments in the legend, and 
each has been printed on the mind's eye for 
ever. Other things we may forget ; we may 
forget the words, although they are beauti- 
ful ; we may forget the author's comment, 
although perhaps it was ingenious and true ; 
but these epoch-making scenes, which put 
the last mark of truth upon a story and fill 
up, at one blow, our capacity for sympathetic 
pleasure, we so adopt into the very bosom of 
our mind that neither time nor tide can 



A Gossip on Romance 257 

efface or weaken the impression. This, 
then, is the plastic part of Hterature : to 
embody character, thought, or emotion in 
some act or attitude that shall be remarkably 
striking to the mind's eye. ^ This is the 
highest and hardest thing to do in words ; 
the thing which, once accomplished, equally 
delights the schoolboy and the sage, and 
makes, in its own right, the quality of epics. 
Compared with this, all other purposes in 
literature, except the purely lyrical or the 
purely philosophic, are bastard in nature, 
facile of execution, and feeble in result. It 
is one thing to write about the inn at Bur- 
ford, or to describe scenery with the word- 
painters ; it is quite another to seize on 
the heart of the suggestion and make a 
country famous with a legend. It is one 
thing to remark and to dissect, with the most 
cutting logic, the complications of life, and of 
the human spirit ; it is quite another to give 
them body and blood in the story of Ajax or of 
Hamlet. The first is literature, but the second 
is something besides, for it is likewise art 



258 Memories and Portraits 

English people of the present day^ are apt, 
I know not why, to look somewhat down on 
incident, and reserve their admiration for 
the clink of teaspoons and the accents of 
the curate. It is thought clever to write a 
novel with no story at all, or at least with a 
very dull one. Reduced even to the lowest 
terms, a certain interest can be communicated 
by the art of narrative ; a sense of human 
kinship stirred ; and a kind of monotonous 
fitness, comparable to the words and air of 
Sandy's Miiil, preserved among the infini- 
tesimal occurrences recorded. Some people 
work, in this manner, with even a strong 
touch. Mr. Trollope's inimitable clergymen 
naturally arise to the mind in this connec- 
tion. But even Mr. Trollope does not con- 
fine himself to chronicling small beer. Mr. 
Crawley's collision with the Bishop's wife, 
Mr. Melnotte dallying in the deserted ban- 
quet-room, are typical incidents, epically 
conceived, fitly embodying a crisis. Or again 
look at Thackeray. If Rawdon Crawley's 
1 1883. 



A Gossip on Romance 259 

blow were not delivered, Vanity Fair would 
cease to be a work of art. That scene is the 
chief ganglion of the tale ; and the discharge 
of energy from Rawdon's fist is the reward 
and consolation of the reader. The end of 
Esmond is a yet wider excursion from the 
author's customary fields ; the scene at 
Castlewood is pure Dumas ; the great and 
wily English borrower has here borrowed 
from the great, unblushing French thief; as 
usual, he has borrowed admirably well, and 
the breaking of the sword rounds off the best 
of all his books with a manly, martial note. 
But perhaps nothing can more strongly 
illustrate the necessity for marking incident 
than to compare the living fame of Robinson 
Crnsoe with the discredit of Clarissa Harlozve. 
Clarissa is a book of a far more startling 
import, worked out, on a great canvas, with 
inimitable courage and unflagging art. It 
contains wit, character, passion, plot, conver- 
sations full of spirit and insight, letters 
sparkling with unstrained humanity ; and if 
the death of the heroine be somewhat frigid 



26o Memories and Portraits 

and artificial, the last days of the hero strike 
the only note of what we now call Byronism, 
between the Elizabethans and Byron himself. 
And yet a little story of a shipwrecked 
sailor, with not a tenth part of the style nor 
a thousandth part of the wisdom, exploring 
none of the arcana of humanity and deprived 
of the perennial interest of love, goes on from 
edition to edition, ever young, while Clarissa 
lies upon the shelves unread. A friend of 
mine, a Welsh blacksmith, was twenty-five 
years old and could neither read nor write, 
when he heard a chapter of Robinson read 
aloud in a farm kitchen. Up to that 
moment he had sat content, huddled in his 
ignorance, but he left that farm another man. 
There were day-dreams, it appeared, divine 
day-dreams, written and printed and bound, 
and to be bought for money and enjoyed at 
pleasure. Down he sat that day, painfully 
learned to read Welsh, and returned to 
borrow the book. It had been lost, nor 
could he find another copy but one that was 
in English. Down he sat once more, learned 



A Gossip on Romance 261 

English, and at length, and with entire 
dehght, read Robinson. It is Hke the story 
of a love-chase. If he had heard a letter 
from Clarissa, would he have been fired with 
the same chivalrous ardour ? I wonder. 
Yet Clarissa has every quality that can be 
shown in prose, one alone excepted — pictorial 
or picture-making romance. While Robinson 
depends, for the most part and with the over- 
whelming majority of its readers, on the 
charm of circumstance. 

In the highest achievements of the art 
of words, the dramatic and the pictorial, the 
moral and romantic interest, rise and fall 
together by a common and organic law. 
Situation is animated with passion, passion 
clothed upon with situation. Neither exists 
for itself, but each inheres indissolubly with 
the other. This is high art ; and not only 
the highest art possible in words, but the 
highest art of all, since it combines the 
greatest mass and diversity of the elements 
of truth and pleasure. Such are epics, and 
the few prose tales that have the epic weight. 



262 Memories and Portraits 

But as from a school of works, aping the \ 
creative, incident and romance are ruthlessly- 
discarded, so may character and drama be 
omitted or subordinated to romance. There 
is one book, for example, more generally- 
loved than Shakespeare, that captivates in 
childhood, and still delights in age — I mean 
the Arabian Nights — where you shall look 
in vain for moral or for intellectual interest. 
No human face or voice greets us among 
that wooden crowd ot kings and genies, 
sorcerers and beggarmen. Adventure, on 
the most naked terms, furnishes forth the 
entertainment and is found enough. Dumas 
approaches perhaps nearest of any modern to 
these Arabian authors in the purely material 
charm of some of his romances. The early 
part of Monte Crista, down to the finding 
of the treasure, is a piece of perfect story- 
telling ; the man never breathed who shared 
these moving incidents without a tremor ; 
and yet Faria is a thing of packthread and 
Dantes little more than a name. The sequel 
is one long-drawn error, gloomy, bloody, un- 



A Gossip on Romance 26^ 

natural and dull ; but as for these early 
chapters, I do not believe there is another 
volume extant where you can breathe the 
same unmingled atmosphere of romance. It 
is very thin and light, to be sure, as on a 
high mountain ; but it is brisk and clear and 
sunny in proportion. I saw the other day, 
with envy, an old and a very clever lady set- 
ting forth on a second or third voyage into 
Monte Cristo. Here are stories which 
powerfully affect the reader, which can be 
reperused at any age, and where the charac- 
ters are no more than puppets. The bony 
fist of the showman visibly propels them ; 
their springs are an open secret ; their faces 
are of wood, their bellies filled with bran ; 
and yet we thrillingly partake of their ad- 
ventures. And the point may be illustrated 
still further. The last interview between 
Lucy and Richard Feveril is pure drama ; 
more than that, it is the strongest scene, 
since Shakespeare, in the English tongue. 
Their first meeting by the river, on the other 
hand, is pure romance ; it has nothing to do 



264 Memories and Portraits 

with character ; it might happen to any 
other boy and maiden, and be none the 
less deh'ghtful for the change. And yet I 
think he would be a bold man who should 
choose between these passages. Thus, in 
the same book, we may have two scenes, 
each capital in its order : in the one, human 
passion, deep calling unto deep, shall utter 
its genuine voice ; in the second, according 
circumstances, like instruments in tune, shall 
build up a trivial but desirable incident, 
such as we love to prefigure for ourselves ; 
and in the end, in spite of the critics, we 
may hesitate to give the preference to either. 
The one may ask more genius — I do not 
say it does ; but at least the other dwells as 
clearly in the memory. 

True romantic art, again, makes a romance 
of all things. It reaches into the highest 
abstraction of the ideal ; it does not refuse 
the most pedestrian realism. Robinson 
Crnsoe is as realistic as it is romantic ; both 
qualities are pushed to an extreme, and 
neither suffers. Nor does romance depend 



A Gossip on Romance 265 

upon the material importance of the in- 
cidents. To deal with strong and deadly 
elements, banditti, pirates, war and murder, 
is to conjure with great names, and, in the 
event of failure, to double the disgrace. The 
arrival of Haydn and Consuelo at the Canon's 
villa is a very trifling incident ; yet wx may 
read a dozen boisterous stories from begin- 
ning to end, and not receive so fresh and stir- 
ring an impression of adventure. It was the 
scene of Crusoe at the wreck, if I remember 
rightly, that so bewitched my blacksmith. 
Nor is the fact surprising. Every single 
article the castaway recovers from the hulk 
is " a joy for ever " to the man who reads of 
them. They are the things that should be 
found, and the bare enumeration stirs the 
blood. I found a glimmer of the same 
interest the other day in a new book, The 
Sailor's Sweetheart^ by Mr. Clark Russell. 
The whole business of the brig Morning Star 
is very rightly felt and spiritedly written ; 
but the clothes, the books and the money 
satisfy the reader's mind like things to eat. 



2 66 Meino7Hes and P or h' aits 

We are dealing here with the old cut-and- 
dry, legitimate interest of treasure trove. 
But even treasure trove can be made dull. 
There are few people who have not groaned 
under the plethora of goods that fell to the 
lot of the Siviss Family Robinson, that dreary 
family. • They found article after article, 
creature after creature, from milk kine to 
pieces of ordnance, a whole consignment ; 
but no informing taste had presided over the 
selection, there was no smack or relish in 
the invoice ; and these riches left the fancy 
cold. The box of goods in Verne's Mysteid- 
ous Island is another case in point : there 
was no gusto and no glamour about that ; 
it might have come from a shop. But the 
two hundred and seventy-eight Australian 
sovereigns on board the Morning Star fell 
upon me like a surprise that I had expected ; 
whole vistas of secondary stories, besides the 
one in hand, radiated forth from that dis- 
covery, as they radiate from a striking particu- 
lar in life ; and I was made for the moment 
as happy as a reader has the right to be. 



A Gossip on Romance 267 

To come at all at the nature of this quality 
of romance, we must bear in mind the pecu- 
liarity of our attitude to any art. No art 
produces illusion; in the theatre we never 
forget that we are in the theatre ; and while t"- ' 
we read a story, we sit wavering between two 
minds, now merely clapping our hands at the 
merit of the performance, now condescending 
to take an active part in fancy with the 
characters. This last is the triumph of 
romantic story-telling : when the reader con- 
sciously plays at being the hero, the scene is 
a good scene. Now in character-studies the 
pleasure that we take is critical; we watch, 
we approve, we smile at incongruities, we are 
moved to sudden heats of sympathy with 
courage, suffering or virtue. But the charac- 
ters are still themselves, they are not us ; the 
more clearly they are depicted, the more 
widely do they stand away from us, the more 
imperiously do they thrust us back into our 
place as a spectator. I cannot identify myself 
with Rawdon Crawley or with Eugene de 
Rastignac, for I have scarce a hope or fear 



268 Memories and Portraits 

in common with them. It is not character 
but incident that woos us out of our reserve. 
Something happens as we desire to have it hap- 
pen to ourselves ; some situation, that we have 
long dallied with in fancy, is realised in the 
story with enticing and appropriate details. 
Then we forget the characters ; then we push 
the hero aside; then we plunge into the tale 
in our own person and bathe in fresh ex- 
perience; and then, and then only, do we say 
we have been reading a romance. It is not 
only pleasurable things that we imagine in 
our day-dreams ; there are lights in which we 
are willing to contemplate even the idea of 
our own death ; ways in which it seems as if 
it would amuse us to be cheated, wounded or 
calumniated. It is thus possible to construct 
a story, even of tragic import, in which every 
incident, detail and trick of circumstance shall 
be welcome to the reader's thoughts. Fiction 
is to the grown man what play is to the 
child ; it is there that he changes the atmo- 
sphere and tenor of his life ; and when 
the game so chimes with his fancy that 



A Gossip oil Romance 269 

he can join in it with all his heart, when 
it pleases him with every turn, when he 
loves to recall it and dwells upon its recol- 
lection with entire delight, fiction is called 
romance. 

Walter Scott is out and away the king of 
the romantics. The Lady of the Lake has no 
indisputable claim to be a poem beyond the 
inherent fitness and desirability of the tale. 
It is just such a story as a man would make 
up for himself, walking, in the best health 
and temper, through just such scenes as it is 
laid in. Hence it is that a charm dwells 
undefinable among these slovenly verses, as 
the unseen cuckoo fills the mountains with his 
note ; hence, even after we have flung the 
book aside, the scenery and adventures re- 
main present to the mind, a new and green 
possession, not unworthy of that beautiful 
name, TJie Lady of the Lake, or that direct, 
romantic opening — one of the most spirited 
and poetical in literature — " The stag at eve 
had drunk his fill." The same strength and 
the same weaknesses adorn and disficfure the 



2 70 Memories and Portraits 

novels. In that ill-written, ragged book, 
The Pirate, the figure of Cleveland — cast up 
by the sea on the resounding foreland of 
Dunrossness — moving, with the blood on his 
hands and the Spanish words on his tongue, 
among the simple islanders — singing a 
serenade under the window of his Shetland 
mistress — is conceived in the very highest 
manner of romantic invention. The words 
of his song, " Through groves of palm," 
sung in such a scene and by such a 
lover, clench, as in a nutshell, the emphatic 
contrast upon which the tale is built. In 
GtLy Mannering, again, every incident is 
delightful to the imagination ; and the 
scene when Harry Bertram lands at Ellan- 
gowan is a model instance of romantic 
method. 

" ' I remember the tune well,' he says, 
' though I cannot guess what should at pre- 
sent so strongly recall it to my memory.' 
He took his flageolet from his pocket and 
played a simple melody. Apparently the 
tune awoke the corresponding associations 



A Gossip on Romance 271 

of a damsel. . . She immediately took up 
the song — 

" * Are these the links of Forth, she said ; 
Or are they the crooks of Dee, 
Or the bonny woods of Warroch Head 
That I sa fain would see?' 

" ' By heaven ! ' said Bertram, * it is the 
very ballad.' " 

On this quotation two remarks fall to be 
made. First, as an instance of modern feel- 
ing for romance, this famous touch of the 
flageolet and the old song is selected by Miss 
Braddon for omission. Miss Braddon's idea 
of a story, like Mrs. Todgers's idea of a 
wooden leg, were something strange to have 
expounded. As a matter of personal ex- 
perience, Meg's appearance to old Mr. Bertram 
on the road, the ruins of Derncleugh, the 
scene of the flageolet, and the Dominie's 
recognition of Harry, are the four strong 
notes that continue to ring in the mind after 
the book is laid aside. The second point is 
still more curious. The reader will observe 
a mark of excision in the passage as quoted 



272 Memories and Portraits 

by me. Well, here is how it runs in the 
original : " a damsel, who, close behind a 
fine spring about half-way down the descent, 
and which had once supplied the castle with 
water, was engaged in bleaching linen." A 
man who gave in such copy would be dis- 
charged from the staff of a daily paper. 
Scott has forgotten to prepare the reader 
for the presence of the " damsel " ; he has 
forgotten to mention the spring and its rela- 
tion to the ruin ; and now, face to face with 
his omission, instead of trying back and 
starting fair, crams all this matter, tail fore- 
most, into a single shambling sentence. It 
is not merely bad English, or bad style; it is 
abominably bad narrative besides. 

Certainly the contrast is remarkable ; and 
it is one that throws a strong light upon the 
subject of this paper. For here we have a 
man of the finest creative instinct touching 
with perfect certainty and charm the romantic 
junctures of his story ; and we find him 
utterly careless, almost, it would seem, in- 
capable, in the technical matter of style, and 



A Gossip on Romance 273 

not only frequently weak, but frequently 
wrong in points of drama. In character parts, 
indeed, and particularly in the Scotch, he w^as 
delicate, strong and truthful; but the trite, 
obliterated features of too many of his heroes 
have already wearied two generations of 
readers. At times his characters will speak 
with something far beyond propriety with a 
true heroic note; but on the next page they 
will be wading wearily forward with an un- 
grammatical and undramatic rigmarole of 
words. The man who could conceive and 
write the character of Elspeth of the Craig- 
burnfoot, as Scott has conceived and written 
it, had not only splendid romantic, but 
splendid tragic gifts. How comes it, then, 
that he could so often fob us off with languid, 
inarticulate twaddle ? 

It seems to me that the explanation is to 
be found in the very quality of his surprising 
merits. As his books are play to the reader, 
so were they play to him. He conjured up 
the romantic with delight, but he had hardly 
patience to describe it. He was a great day- 



274 Memories and Portraits 

dreamer, a seer of fit and beautiful and 
humorous visions, but hardly a great artist; 
hardly, in the manful sense, an artist at all. 
He pleased himself, and so he pleases us. Of 
the pleasures of his art he tasted fully; but 
of its toils and vigils and distresses never 
man knew less. A great romantic — an idle 
child. 



XVI 
A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 



"^irE have recently^ enjoyed a quite 
peculiar pleasure : hearing, in some 
detail, the opinions, about the art they practise, 
of Mr. Walter Besant and Mr. Henry James; 
two men certainly of very different calibre : 
Mr. James so precise of outline, so cunning 
of fence, so scrupulous of finish, and Mr. 
Besant so genial, so friendly, with so per- 
suasive and humorous a vein of whim : Mr. 
James the very type of the deliberate artist, 

^ This paper, which does not otherwise fit the present 
volume, is reprinted here as the proper continuation of 
the last. 

2 1884. 



276 Me7nories and Porh^ails 

Mr. Besant the impersonation of good nature. 
That such doctors should differ will excite 
no great surprise ; but one point in which 
they seem to agree fills me, I confess, with 
wonder. For they are both content to talk 
about the "art of fiction;" and Mr. Besant, 
waxing exceedingly bold, goes on to oppose 
this so-called " art of fiction " to the " art of 
poetry." By the art of poetry he can mean 
nothing but the art of verse, an art of handi- 
craft, and only comparable with the art of 
prose. For that heat and height of sane 
emotion which we agree to call by the name 
of poetry, is but a libertine and vagrant 
quality ; present, at times, in any art, more 
often absent from them all ; too seldom 
present in the prose novel, too frequently 
absent from the ode and epic. Fiction is in 
the same case ; it is no substantive art, but 
an element which enters largely into all the 
arts but architecture. Homer, Wordsworth, 
Phidias, Hogarth, and Salvini, all deal in 
fiction ; and yet I do not suppose that either 
Hogarth or Salvini, to mention but these 



A Humble Remonstrance 277 

two, entered in any degree into the scope 
of Mr. Besant's interesting lecture or Mr. 
James's charming essay. The art of fiction, 
then, regarded as a definition, is both too 
ample and too scanty. Let me suggest 
another ; let me suggest that what both Mr. 
James and Mr. Besant had in view was 
neither more nor less than the art of nar- 
rative. 

But Mr. Besant is anxious to speak solely 
of " the modern English novel," the stay and 
bread - winner of Mr. Mudie ; and in the 
author of the most pleasing novel on that 
roll, All Sorts and Conditions of Men, the 
desire is natural enough. I can conceive 
then, that he would hasten to propose two 
additions, and read thus : the art ot fictitious 
narrative in prose. 

Now the fact of the existence of the 
modern English novel is not to be denied ; 
materially, with its three volumes, leaded 
type, and gilded lettering, it is easily dis- 
tinguishable from other forms of literature ; 
but to talk at all fruitfully of any branch of 



278 Memories and Portraits 

art, it is needful to build our definitions on 
some more fundamental ground than binding. 
Why, then, are we to add "in prose?" The 
Odyssey appears to me the best of romances ; 
TJte Lady of the Lake to stand high in the 
second order ; and Chaucer's tales and pro- 
logues to contain more of the matter and art 
of the modern English novel than the whole 
treasury of Mr. Mudie. Whether a narrative 
be written in blank verse or the Spenserian 
stanza, in the long period of Gibbon or the 
chipped phrase of Charles Reade, the prin- 
ciples of the art of narrative must be equally 
observed. The choice of a noble and swell- 
ing style in prose affects the problem of 
narration in the same way, if not to the same 
degree, as the choice of measured verse ; for 
both imply a closer synthesis of events, a 
higher key of dialogue, and a more picked 
and stately strain of words. If you are to 
refuse Do7i Jumi, it is hard to see why you 
should include Zaiioni or (to bracket works 
of very different value) The Scarlet Letter ; 
and by what discrimination are you to open 



A Humble Remonstrance 279 

your doors to The Pilgrim's Progress and 
close them on The Faery Queen ? To bring 
things closer home, I will here propound to 
Mr. Besant a conundrum. A narrative called 
Paradise Lost was written in English verse 
by one John Milton ; what was it then ? It 
was next translated by Chateaubriand into 
French prose ; and what was it then ? 
Lastly, the French translation was, by some 
inspired compatriot of George Gilfillan (and 
of mine) turned bodily into an English novel ; 
and, in the name of clearness, what was it 
then } 

But, once more, why should we add 
"fictitious"? The reason why is obvious. 
The reason why not, if something more 
recondite, does not want for weight. The 
art of narrative, in fact, is the same, whether 
it is applied to the selection and illustration 
of a real series of events or of an imaginary 
series. Boswell's Life of JoJinson (a work of 
cunning and inimitable art) owes its success to 
the same technical manoeuvres as (let us say) 
Tom fones : the clear conception of certain 



28o Memories and Portraits 

characters of man, the choice and presenta- 
tion of certain incidents out of a great 
number that offered, and the invention 
(yes, invention) and preservation of a cer- 
tain key in dialogue. In which these things 
are done vi^ith the more art — in which 
with the greater air of nature — readers will 
differently judge. Boswell's is, indeed, a 
very special case, and almost a generic ; but 
it is not only in Boswell, it is in every 
biography with any salt of life, it is in every 
history where events and men, rather than 
ideas, are presented — in Tacitus, in Carlyle, 
in Michelet, in Macaulay — that the novelist 
will find many of his own methods most 
conspicuously and adroitly handled. He 
will find besides that he, who is free — who 
has the right to invent or steal a missing 
incident, who has the right, more precious 
still, of wholesale omission — is frequently 
defeated, and, with all his advantages, leaves 
a less strong impression of reality and pas- 
sion. Mr. James utters his mind with a 
becoming fervour on the sanctity of truth to 



A Humble Remonstrance 



281 



the novelist ; on a more careful examination 
truth will seem a word of very debateable 
propriety, not only for the labours of the 
novelist, but for those of the historian. No 
art — to use the daring phrase of Mr. James 
— can successfully " compete with life ;" and 
the art that seeks to do so is condemned 
to perish viontibus aviis. Life goes before 
us, infinite in complication ; attended by the 
most various and surprising meteors ; ap- 
pealing at once to the eye, to the ear, to the 
mind — the seat of wonder, to the touch — so 
thrillingly delicate, and to the belly — so 
imperious when starved. It combines and 
employs in its manifestation the method and 
material, not of one art only, but of all 
the arts. Music is but an arbitrary trifling 
with a few of life's majestic chords ; paint- 
ing is but a shadow of its pageantry of 
light and colour ; literature does but drily 
indicate that wealth of incident, of moral 
obligation, of virtue, vice, action, rapture 
and agony, with which it teems. To " com- 
pete with life," whose sun we cannot look 



2 82 Memories and Portraits 

upon, whose passions and diseases waste and 
slay us — to compete with the flavour of 
wine, the beauty of the dawn, the scorching 
of fire, the bitterness of death and separation 
— here is, indeed, a projected escalade of 
heaven ; here are, indeed, labours for a Her- 
cules in a dress coat, armed with a pen and 
a dictionary to depict the passions, armed 
with a tube of superior flake-white to paint 
the portrait of the insufferable sun. No art 
is true in this sense : none can " compete 
with life : " not even history, built indeed of 
indisputable facts, but these facts robbed of 
their vivacity and sting ; so that even when 
we read of the sack of a city or the fall of 
an empire, we are surprised, and justly com- 
mend the author's talent, if our pulse be 
quickened. And mark, for a last differentia, 
that this quickening of the pulse is, in almost 
every case, purely agreeable ; that these 
phantom reproductions of experience, even 
at their most acute, convey decided pleasure ; 
while experience itself, in the cockpit of life, 
can torture and slay. 



A Humble Remonstrance 283 

What, then, is the object, what the method, 
of an art, and what the source of its power ? 
The whole secret is that no art does " com- 
pete with life." Man's one method, whether 
he reasons or creates, is to half-shut his eyes 
against the dazzle and confusion of reality. 
The arts, like arithmetic and geometry, turn 
away their eyes from the gross, coloured and 
mobile nature at our feet, and regard instead 
a certain figmentary abstraction. Geometry 
will tell us of a circle, a thing never seen in 
nature ; asked about a green circle or an 
iron circle, it lays its hand upon its mouth. 
So with the arts. Painting, ruefully com- 
paring sunshine and flake -white, gives up 
truth of colour, as it had already given up 
relief and movement ; and instead of vying 
with nature, arranges a scheme of harmonious 
tints. Literature, above all in its most typi- 
cal mood, the mood of narrative, similarly 
flees the direct challenge and pursues instead 
an independent and creative aim. So far as 
it imitates at all, it imitates not life but 
speech : not the facts of human destiny, but 



2 84 Memories and Portraits 

the emphasis and the suppressions v/ith 
which the human actor tells of them. The 
real art that dealt with life directly was 
that of the first men who told their stories 
round the savage camp-fire. Our art is 
occupied, and bound to be occupied, not so 
much in making stories true as in making 
them typical ; not so much in capturing the 
lineaments of each fact, as in marshalling all 
of them towards a common end. For the 
welter of impressions, all forcible but all 
discreet, which life presents, it substitutes a 
certain artificial series of impressions, all 
indeed most feebly represented, but all aim- 
ing at the same effect, all eloquent of the 
same idea, all chiming together like con- 
sonant notes in music or like the graduated 
tints in a good picture. From all its chap- 
ters, from all its pages, from all its sentences, 
the well-written novel echoes and re-echoes 
its one creative and controlling thought ; to 
this must every incident and character con- 
tribute ; the style must have been pitched 
in unison with this ; and if there is anywhere 



A Httrnble Remonstrance 285 

a word that looks another way, the book 
would be stronger, clearer, and (I had almost 
said) fuller without it. Life is monstrous, 
infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant ; a 
work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, 
self-contained, rational, flowing and emascu- 
late. Life imposes by brute energy, like 
inarticulate thunder ; art catches the ear, 
among the far louder noises of experience, 
like an air artificially made by a discreet 
musician. A proposition of geometry does 
not compete with life ; and a proposition of 
geometry is a fair and luminous parallel for 
a work of art. Both are reasonable, both 
untrue to the crude fact ; both inhere in 
nature, neither represents it. The novel, 
which is a work of art, exists, not by its 
resemblances to life, which are forced and 
material, as a shoe must still consist of 
leather, but by its immeasurable difference 
from life, which is designed and significant, 
and is both the method and the meaninsf of 
the work. 

The life of man is not the subject of 



2 86 Memories and Portraits 

novels, but the inexhaustible magazine from 
which subjects are to be selected ; the name 
of these is legion ; and with each new subject 
— for here again I must differ by the whole 
width of heaven from Mr. James — the true 
artist will vary his method and change the 
point of attack. That which was in one 
case an excellence, will become a defect in 
another ; what was the making of one book, 
will in the next be impertinent or dull. 
First each novel, and then each class of- 
novels, exists by and for itself I will take, 
for instance, three main classes, which are 
fairly distinct : first, the novel of adventure, 
which appeals to certain almost sensual and 
quite illogical tendencies in man ; second, 
the novel of character, which appeals to our 
intellectual appreciation of man's foibles and 
mingled and inconstant motives ; and third, 
the dramatic novel, which deals with the same 
stuff as the serious theatre, and appeals to 
our emotional nature and moral judgment. 

And first for the novel of adventure. Mr. 
James refers, with singular generosity of 



A Humble Remonstrance 287 

praise, to a little book about a quest for 
hidden treasure ; but he lets fall, by the way, 
some rather startling words. In this book he 
misses what he calls the " immense luxury " 
of being able to quarrel with his author. 
The luxury, to most of us, is to lay by our 
judgment, to be submerged by the tale as by 
a billow, and only to awake, and begin to 
distinguish and find fault, when the piece is 
over and the volume laid aside. Still more 
remarkable is Mr. James's reason. He can- 
not criticise the author, as he goes, " because," 
says he, comparing it with another work, " / 
have been a child ^ but I have never been on a 
qiLest for buried treasnreP Here is, indeed, 
a wilful paradox ; for if he has never been 
on a quest for buried treasure, it can be 
demonstrated that he has never been a child. 
There never was a child (unless Master 
James) but has hunted gold, and been a 
pirate, and a military commander, and a 
bandit of the mountains ; but has fought, and 
suffered shipwreck and prison, and imbrued 
its little hands in gore, and gallantly retrieved 



2 88 Memories and Portraits 

the lost battle, and triumphantly protected 
innocence and beauty. Elsewhere in his essay 
Mr. James has protested with excellent reason 
against too narrow a conception of experience ; 
for the born artist, he contends, the " faintest 
hints of life " are converted into revelations ; 
and it will be found true, I believe, in a 
majority of cases, that the artist writes with 
more gusto and effect of those things which he 
has only wished to do, than of those which 
he has done. Desire is a wonderful telescope, 
and Pisgah the best observatory. Now, while, 
it is true that neither Mr. James nor the author 
of the work in question has ever, in the 
fleshly sense, gone questing after gold, it is 
probable that both have ardently desired 
and fondly imagined the details of such a Hfe 
in youthful day-dreams ; and the author, count- 
ing upon that, and well aware (cunning and 
low-minded man !) that this class of interest, 
having been frequently treated, finds a readily 
accessible and beaten road to the sympathies 
of the reader, addressed himself throughout 
to the building up and circumstantiation of 



A Humble Remoitsh^ance 289 

this boyish dream. Character to the boy is 
a sealed book ; for him, a pirate is a beard, a 
pair of wide trousers and a Uberal complement 
of pistols. The author, for the sake of circum- 
stantiation and because he was himself more 
or less grown up, admitted character, within 
certain limits, into his design ; but only 
within certain limits. Had the same puppets 
figured in a scheme of another sort, they had 
been drawn to very different purpose ; for in 
this elementary novel of adventure, the 
characters need to be presented with but one 
class of qualities — the warlike and formidable. 
So as they appear insidious In deceit and 
fatal in the combat, they have served their 
end. Danger is the matter with which this 
class of novel deals ; fear, the passion with 
which it idly trifles ; and the characters are 
portrayed only so far as they realise the 
sense of danger and provoke the sympathy 
of fear. To add more traits, to be too clever, 
to start the hare of moral or intellectual in- 
terest while we are running the fox of 

material interest. Is not to enrich but to 
U 



290 Memories and Portraits 

stultify your tale. The stupid reader will 
only be offended, and the clever reader lose 
the scent. 

The novel of character has this difference 
from all others : that it requires no coherency 
of plot, and for this reason, as in the case of 
Gil Bias, it is sometimes called the novel of 
adventure. It turns on the humours of the 
persons represented ; these are, to be sure, 
embodied in incidents, but the incidents 
themselves, being tributary, need not march 
in a progression ; and the characters may be 
statically shown. As they enter, so they 
may go out ; they must be consistent, but 
they need not grow. Here Mr. James will 
recognise the note of much of his own work : 
he treats, for the most part, the statics of 
character, studying it at rest or only gently 
moved ; and, with his usual delicate and just 
artistic instinct, he avoids those stronger 
passions which would deform the attitudes 
he loves to study, and change his sitters from 
the humorists of ordinary life to the brute 
forces and bare types of more emotional 



A Humble Remonstrance 291 

moments. In his VQCcni Author of Beltraffio, 
so just in conception, so nimble and neat in 
workmanship, strong passion is indeed em- 
ployed ; but observe that it is not displayed. 
Even in the heroine the working of the 
passion is suppressed ; and the great struggle, 
the true tragedy, the scme-a-faire , passes un- 
seen behind the panels of a locked door. The 
delectable invention of the young visitor is 
introduced, consciously or not, to this end : 
that Mr. James, true to his method, might 
avoid the scene of passion. I trust no reader 
will suppose me guilty of undervaluing this 
little masterpiece. I mean merely that it 
belongs to one marked class of novel, and 
that it would have been very differently con- 
ceived and treated had it belonged to that 
other marked class, of which I now proceed 
to speak. 

I take pleasure in calling the dramatic 
novel by that name, because it enables me 
to point out by the way a strange and 
peculiarly English misconception. It is 
sometimes supposed that the drama consists 



2 92 Memories and Portraits 

of incident. It consists of passion, which 
gives the actor his opportunity ; and that 
passion must progressively increase, or the 
actor, as the piece proceeded, would be un- 
able to carry the audience from a lower to a 
higher pitch of interest and emotion. A 
good serious play must therefore be founded 
on one of the passionate criices of life, where 
duty and inclination come nobly to the 
grapple ; and the same is true of what I call, 
for that reason, the dramatic novel. I will 
instance a few worthy specimens, all of our 
own day and language ; Meredith's RJioda 
Flemiftg, that wonderful and painful book, 
long out of print,^ and hunted for at book- 
stalls like an Aldine ; Hardy's Pair of Blue 
Eyes; and two of Charles Reade's, Griffith 
Gaimt and The Double Marriage, originally 
called White Lies, and founded (by an 
accident quaintly favourable to my nomen- 
clature) on a play by Maquet, the partner of 
the great Dumas. In this kind of novel the 
closed door of The Author of Beltraffio must 

^ Now no longer so, thank Heaven ! 



A Humble Remonstrance . 293 

be broken open ; passion must appear upon 
the scene and utter its last word ; passion is 
the be-all and the end-all, the plot and the 
solution, the protagonist and the dens ex 
machiiid in one. The characters may come 
anyhow upon the stage : we do not care ; 
the point is, that, before they leave it, they 
shall become transfigured and raised out of 
themselves by passion. It may be part of 
the design to draw them with detail ; to 
depict a full-length character, and then 
behold it melt and change in the furnace of 
emotion. But there is no obligation of the 
sort ; nice portraiture is not required ; and 
we are content to accept mere abstract types, 
so they be strongly and sincerely moved. A 
novel of this class may be even great, and 
yet contain no individual figure ; it may be 
great, because it displays the workings of the 
perturbed heart and the impersonal utterance 
of passion ; and with an artist of the second 
class it is, indeed, even more likely to be 
great, when the issue has thus been narrowed 
and the whole force of the writer's mind 



294 Memories and Portraits 

directed to passion alone. Cleverness again, 
which has its fair field in the novel of charac- 
ter, is debarred all entry upon this more 
solemn theatre. A far-fetched motive, an 
ingenious evasion of the issue, a witty instead 
of a passionate turn, oftend us like an in- 
sincerity. All should be plain, all straight- 
forward to the end. Hence it is that, in 
RJioda Flemings Mrs. Lovel raises such resent- 
ment in the reader ; her motives are too 
flimsy, her ways are too equivocal, for the 
weight and strength of her surroundings. 
Hence the hot indignation of the reader when 
Balzac, after having begun the DucJtcsse de 
Langeais in terms of strong if somewhat 
swollen passion, cuts the knot by the derange- 
ment of the hero's clock. Such personages 
and incidents belong to the novel of charac- 
ter ; they are out of place in the high 
society of the passions ; when the passions 
are introduced in art at their full height, we 
look to see them, not baffled and impotently 
striving, as in life, but towering above ciixum 
stance and acting substitutes for fate. 



A Humble Remonstrance 295 

And here I can imagine Mr. James, with 
his lucid sense, to intervene. To much of 
what I have said he would apparently demur; 
in much he would, somewhat impatiently, 
acquiesce. It may be true; but it is not 
what he desired to say or to hear said. He 
spoke of the finished picture and its worth 
when done ; I, of the brushes, the palette, 
and the north light. He uttered his views 
in the tone and for the ear of good society; 
I, with the emphasis and technicalities of the 
obtrusive student. But the point, I may 
reply, is not merely to amuse the public, 
but to offer helpful advice to the young 
writer. And the young writer will not so 
much be helped by genial pictures of what 
an art may aspire to at its highest, as by a 
true idea of what it must be on the lowest 
terms. The best that we can say to him is 
this : Let him choose a motive, whether of 
character or passion ; carefully construct his 
plot so that every incident is an illustration 
of the motive, and every property employed 
shall bear to it a near relation of congruity 



296 Memories and Portraits 

or contrast; avoid a sub-plot, unless, as some- 
times in Shakespeare, the sub-plot be a rever- 
sion or complement of the main intrigue ; 
suffer not his style to flag below the level of 
the argument; pitch the key of conversation, 
not with any thought of how men talk in 
parlours, but with a single eye to the degree 
of passion he may be called on to express ; 
and allow neither himself in the narrative nor 
any character in the course of the dialogue, 
to utter one sentence that is not part and 
parcel of the business of the story or the 
discussion of the problem involved. Let 
him not regret if this shortens his book ; it 
will be better so ; for to add irrelevant 
matter is not to lengthen but to bury. Let 
him not mind if he miss a thousand qualities, 
so that he keeps unflaggingly in pursuit of 
the one he has chosen. Let him not care 
particularly if he miss the tone of conversa- 
tion, the pungent material detail of the day's 
manners, the reproduction of the atmosphere 
and the environment. These elements are 
not essential : a novel may be excellent, and 



A Humble Remonstrance 297 

yet have none of them ; a passion or a 
character is so much the better depicted as 
it rises clearer from material circumstance. 
In this age of the particular, let him remem- 
ber the ages of the abstract, the great books 
of the past, the brave men that lived before 
Shakespeare and before Balzac. And as 
the root of the whole matter, let him bear in 
mind that his novel is not a transcript of 
life, to be judged by its exactitude ; but a 
simplification of some side or point of life, to 
stand or fall by its significant simplicity. 
For although, in great men, working upon 
great motives, what we observe and admire 
is often their complexity, yet underneath 
appearances the truth remains unchanged : 
that simplification was their method, and 
that simplicity is their excellence. 

II 

Since the above was written another 
novelist has entered repeatedly the lists of 
theory: one well worthy of mention, Mr 



298 Memories and Portraits 

W. D. Howells; and none ever couched a lance 
with narrower convictions. His own work 
and those of his pupils and masters singly 
occupy his mind ; he is the bondslave, the 
zealot of his school ; he dreams of an advance 
in art like what there is in science; he thinks 
of past things as radically dead ; he thinks a 
form can be outlived : a strange immersion in 
his own history; a strange forgetfulness of the 
history of the race ! Meanwhile, by a glance 
at his own works (could he see them with 
the eager eyes of his readers) much of this 
illusion would be dispelled. For while he 
holds all the poor little orthodoxies of the 
day — no poorer and no smaller than those 
of yesterday or to-morrow, poor and small, 
indeed, only so far as they are exclusive — the 
living quality of much that he has done is of 
a contrary, I had almost said of a heretical, 
complexion. A man, as I read him, of an 
originally strong romantic bent — a certain 
glow of romance still resides in many of his 
books, and lends them their distinction. As 
by accident he runs out and revels in the 



A Humble Remonstrance 299 

exceptional; and it is then, as often as not, 
that his reader rejoices — ^justly, as I contend. 
For in all this excessive eagerness to be 
centrally human, is there not one central 
human thing that Mr. Howells is too often 
tempted to neglect: I mean himself? A 
poet, a finished artist, a man in love with 
the appearances of life, a cunning reader of 
the mind, he has other passions and aspira- 
tions than those he loves to draw. And 
why should he suppress himself and do such 
reverence to the Lemuel Barkers ? The ob- 
vious is not of necessity the normal ; fashion 
rules and deforms; the majority fall tamely 
into the contemporary shape, and thus attain, 
in the ^y^?, of the true observer, only a higher 
power of insignificance ; and the danger is 
lest, in seeking to draw the normal, a man 
should draw the null, and write the novel of 
society instead of the romance of man. 



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the memoir, throws so much light upon his own strong personality, that 
the book is sure to exoite the greatest interest. 







Uniform with Obiter Didao 
ETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS« 



BY ANDREW LANG. 
/ Vol., El:{evir i6mo. Gilt Top, ^i,oo. 



IT is a happy fancy of Mr. 
Lang's to unbosom himself 
of some of the brightest, wit- 
tiest and most thoughtful criti- 
cisms of recent years by writing 
it directly to the great dead 
themselves — always with thor- 
ough reverence and apprecia- 
tion, and the most charming 
regard for their ways of thought, 
but with perfect frankness. The 
public thus gains at second 
hand one of the brightest collec- 
tions of literary estimates which 
any contemporary writer — not 
even excepting the author ot 
" Obiter Dicta " — could have 
given them. The little Elzevir 
volume, with its page and print, 
would of itself have appealed to 
many of the dead authors, as it 
will to modern readers. 



CONTENTS. 

To "W. M. Thackeray. 

To Charles Dickens. 

To Pierre de Ronzard. 

To Herodotus. 

Epistle to Mr. Alexander Pope, 

To Lucien of Samosata. 

To Maitre Francoys Rabelais. 

To Jane Austen. 

To Master Isaak Walton. 

To M. Chapelain. 

To Sir John Manndeville, Kt. 

To Alexandre Dumas. 

To Theocritus. 

To Edgar Allan Poe. 

To Sir Walter Scott, Bart. 

To Eusebius of Caesarea. 

To Percy Bysshe Shelley. 

To Monsieur de Moliere 

To Robert Burns. 

To Omar Khayyam. 

To Q. Horatius Flaccus. 



" The book is one of the luxuries of 
the literary taste. It is meant for the 
exquisite palate, and is prepared by one 
of the ' knowing ' kind. It is an aston- 
ishing little volume," — N, V, Evening 
Post. 



" Mr. Andrew Lang is decidedly a 
clever and dexterous literary workman, 
and we doubt if he has ever done any- 
thing neater or more finished than 
these 'Letters to Dead Authors,'"— r/4^ 
Christian Union. 



o 



BITER DICTA. 



(FIRST SERIES.) 



AUGUSTINE BIRRELL. 



/ Vol,, Elzevir i6mo. 
Gilt Top, p. 00. 



CONTENTS. 

Carlyle. 

On the Alleged Obscurity of Mr. 
Browning's Poetry. 

Truth-Hunting. 

Actors. 

A Rogue's Memoirs. 

The Via Media. 

Falstaff. 



" A very dainty little book — daintily 
written, daintily printed, and daintily 
bound. The author has a fine turn of 
style, a very pretty wit, a solid and 
manly vein of reflection. . . . An 
eminently pleasant and companionable 
book. Open it where we may, we find 
something to entertain and stimulate, 
to invite meditation, and provoke re- 
flection ." — limes. 

"Some admirably written essays. . . . 
Amusing and brilliant. . . . The book 
is the book of a highly cultivated man, 
"With a real gift of expression, a good 
deal of humor, a happy fancy, an im- 
aginative respect for religion, and a 
rather skeptical bias." — Spectator. 



"This brilliant and thought-compel- 
ling little book. , . . Apart from their 
intellectual grip, which we think really 
notable, the great charm of these essays 
lies in the fine urbanity of their satirical 
humor," — Academy, 

" Each essay is a gem of thought — not 
of heavy, ponderous, didactic thought, 
but of thought light, fanciful, and play- 
ful, yet conveying much wisdom," — 
Standard. 

"The author is evidently a man of 
considerable reading, with opinions of 
his own, which he can express with 
vigor and humor. . . . The book is 
very readable and suggestive," — St. 
James's Gazette. 

" A book to be enjoyed precisely be- 
cause of the irresponsibility which its 
clever author successfully affects. . . . 
We trust this is only the first of many 
such books, for the author of Obiter 
Dicta has it in him to delight his gen- 
eration for long years to come with 
writing as little commonplace and as 
abounding in point and wit as any that 
has been seen in a bookseller's shop 
since his favorite Charles Lamb ceased 
to button-hole and fascinate English 
mankind." — Liverpool Daily Post, 

" Such work as this needs no name 
to carry it ; its qualifications appear on 
the surface, and not only solicit, but 
command attention and hearing. It is 
a book which will interest and delight 
all lovers of good writing, and especial- 
ly all those who enjoy contact with a 
fresh, suggestive, incisive thinker,"— 
The Christian Union, 



"A collection of papers of which, per- 
haps, the most obvious quality is its lit- 
erary quality. The book is neat, ap- 
posite, clever, full of quaint allusions, 
happy thoughts, and apt unfamiliar quo- 
tations." — Boston Advertiser. 



" The essays are all cleverly written. 
There is an air of ease and restfulneM 
about them that is quite refreshing,"— 
Brooklyn Times. 



" The book is pervaded by freshness, 
manliness, fine feeling, and intellectual 
integrity." — New York Times. 

** Charmingly written, and always 
eminently readable." — Philadelphia 
Record. 

" The little volume is a delightful one, 
and its essays are written with great 
charm of style and winning frankness. 
The book is full of pleasant and refined 
reading for all people of cultivated 
tastes." — Boston Saturday Evening- 
Gazette. 

"The tone and spirit of the essays are 
admirable ; there is no attempt at ped- 
antry, no painful display of contorted 
wit; the essays resemble the careful 
conversation of a cultured gentleman, 
and they are thoroughly fresh and en- 
tertaining," — B2iffalo Times, 

"The book is remarkable for a light- 
ness of touch and vivacity worthy of 
the best French writers, as well as for a 
fundamental tone of good sense that is 
all English." — The Exattiiner. 

"The writer ofthis volume represents 
the best criticism of the day. He would 
apply his principles to every art of ex- 
pression, and to every habit of thinking. 
He would have all mental processes 
brought before the reason for its judg- 
ment. Everywhere is evinced a strong 
artistic sense. Consistency and sym- 
metry are insisted upon in the develop- 
ment and employment of thought. The 
book is wisely written, and it deserves 
to be wisely read." — Boston Transcript. 

" Wit, tenderness, delivery, and dis- 
cerning criticism are combined in an un- 
usual degree, and the letters, taken as a 
group, constitute one of the freshest and 
most pleasing series of literary essay's 
printed for many a day." — Boston 
Journal, 

"The topics of these letters indicate a 
scholarly study, and are handled with a 
vivacity which, extending from the 
grave to the gay, makes the volume an 
instructive and charming literary aoxsx- 
panion."— CizVa^tf Interior. 



Q BITER DICTA. 

(SECOND SERIES.) 



BY 

AUGUSTINE BIRRELL. 



/ Vol,, Elievir i6mo. 
Gilt Top, ^1,00, 



CONTENTS. 

Milton. 

Pope. 

Johnson, 

Burke. 

The Muse of History. 

Charles Lamb. 

Emerson. 

The Office of Literature. 

Worn-out Types. 

Cambridge and the Poets. 

Book-buying. 



The remarkable reception -which was 
accorded to the first series ofthis work, 
and the large sale which it met with, 
in all parts of the country, almost 
itnmediately on publication, warrants 
the belief that a still larger demand 
will arise for the second series. The 
subjects treated of in the second series 
of OBITER DICTA have a permanent 
interest ; and are such as will draw 
special attention in consequence of 
many of them having been under recent 
discussion. 



RANK R. Stockton's Writings. 



NEJV UNIFORM EDITION. 
THE BEE-MAN OF ORN, and Other Fanciful Tales. 
THE LADY, OR THE TIGER? and Other Stories. 
THE CHRISTMAS WRECK, and Other Stories. 
THE LATE MRS. NULL. AuLfy^^S^,^ 

RUDDER GRANGE. ^^yZT 

*** The set, five vols., $6.25 ; each, $1.25. /fe^ ^^ 



RUDDER GRANGE. New Illustrated Edition. IVith 
over 100 Illustrations by A. B. Frost. Square i2mo, 
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THE LADY, OR THE TIGER? and Other Stories. 

i2mo, paper, 50 cents. 
THE CHRISTMAS WRECK, and Other Stories. i2mo, 

paper, ^o cents. 
RUDDER GRANGE. i2mo, paper, 60 cents. 



A JOLLY FELLOWSHIP. Illustrated, i2mo, p .^o. 
THE STORY OF VITEAU. ^Illustrated, i2mo, p.^o. 
THE TING-A-LING TALES. Illustrated, i2mo, p.oo. 
THE FLOATING PRINCE, and Other Fairy Tales. 
Illustrated, 4to, cloth, p.^o; hoards, ^7.50. 

ROUNDABOUT RAMBLES IN LANDS OF FACT 

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